Thursday, August 31, 2017

Israel sitting on Vast Oil Reserves

It is known that the Iraqi oil fields continue towards the Israeli Golan in a long "oil belt" (extrapolate those red blots on the map left). The Saudi Plate is tilted towards the Gulf, where the oil is found almost in the surface, but deep and costly to extract in its Golan extreme.  We have this Afeq company, a subsidiary of Genie Oil, that had bored 4 wells on the Golan without success. Sure, they found much oil saturated rock but that is unextractable, the theory is that volcanic activity is heating up the oil bearing rock and liquefying the oil. Liquid oil is gold. The problem is how to find those hot liquid lakes of oil.

Another problem is that the Golan is recognized as Syrian territory. Only if Syria breaks up and new entities arise, then maybe the Golan oil will be undisputedly ours to extract and sell. Assad is a pain in the ass, he is holding Syria together and letting Russia and Iran in. He is an Alawi Shia heretic ruling over an Orthodox Shiite population.

North Korea Shorting the Markets

The  Armstrong Report publishes a photo of Kim Ilsung watching the launch of a missile. But look at the computer monitor: he is clearly following the markets in real time.
He is studying the effect of his military moves on the market, probably trying to induce fear and profit from his shorts.

Mouse Utopia

  The logistic curve.


Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Israeli Monetary Policy

The US dollar lost 7% of its worth vis-a-vis the Israeli sheqel this year. The very strong message/pressure of the advisers to diversify to foreign markets has proved to be wrong. Happily I continued putting all my eggs in one basket, TASE Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

I think the sheqel is kept strong and expensive because (1) foreign investment is flowing in to Israeli startups, and (2) the government tries to force down prices, including importing fresh fruits and cheese and meat. I used to pay 1000 sh per visit to the supermarket, today it is 500. The cost of living is lower. Where the gov is failing is in driving down apartment prices, it is not working.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Tehila

My Granddaughter. She has a strong character.

The Globe: We are coming!

Daughter studying English Literature so we have to travel to drink culture from its very source: The London Globe. There we are coming soon! Terry Michelle (pic) is the new Director, and she promises that forthcoming productions at the Globe will have equal roles for men and women. Shakespeare would have never agreed. But she is cute.

French Identity Issues


When I was an adolescent in Buenos Aires, we Jewish boys all battled unsolvable identity issues. Being a Jew was a most problematic identity, no one knew how to deal with it. Now I see that the French had caught the Galuth neurosis: this book tells the story of a French girl with some nebulous Algerian ancestry, who "returns" to Algeria to fill in the silences of her parents. Not long ago, the French had a solid idea of themselves and what they were, but now everything is mixed up and no one knows who he/she is. They are suffering and unhappy, and trying to work out their identities by writing books. As for me, Zionism dissolved any complex I may have had, and my children are free of this mental disease.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Fake Doctors Are Good for Patients

That is the paradoxical conclusion of an economic model built by Berk et al.:
We model a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the standards and disclosure requirements that exist in these markets. We show that reducing the number of charlatans through regulation decreases consumer surplus. Although both standards and disclosure drive charlatans out of the market, consumers are worse off because of the resulting reduction in competition amongst producers. Producers, on the other hand, strictly benefit from the regulation, implying that the regulation we observe in these markets likely derives from producer interests.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Vice News Embeds a Sexy Girl



Vice News's report on the Charlottesville Rally.

This frivolous Old Jew's first reaction: that female reporter is very sexy.

The second reaction: These are Nazis. Quote Netaniyahu: "This is not a small thing".

I have no dog in this fight, yet for this Jew there is no choice, my side is "Black Lives". 

The meaning of the sacking of the Chief Security Adviser Bannon


Palestinian chief Abu Mazen met yesterday with Israeli Meretz party leaders to coordinate strategy. He said that he had met the American administration twenty times and has no idea what they want to do.

Israeli security expert Shiftan said that they tried to establish contact with the American Government advisers but found that the Administration is not yet in place, many positions are yet to be filled, so they have to wait till the Americans pull themselves together.

Der Spiegel writes incendiary articles against Trump, it says he is a danger to the world. The Germans cannot reconciliate themselves with American power.

The One Percent

Xenophon tells the story of the Conspiracy of Kinadon in Sparta at the peak of its power.  Kinadon was a brilliant military leader, a highly positioned citizen of the Spartan State. The ruling elite, the Spartiates, were called homoioi (the Equals). An Equal could lose his privileged status through cowardice in battle or by poverty, for example, the loss of his plot and the consequent inability to pay his dues to the syssitia,and would join the "Inferiors" (hypomeiones).

In one public meeting, Kinadon counted the number of Spartiates and they were found to be forty among the four thousand. "The privileged One Percent! They are our enemies!" he said. Apparently, two thousand five hundred years ago the Greeks had the same problem of the 1%. Kinadon's motive for the conspiracy was, as he stated in the course of his trial, "to be a Lacedaemonian inferior to no one". There was no currency in Sparta, the Spartiates's food was disgusting - pork boiled in its blood and vinegar -, they spent their lives in dangerous military missions, so the privilege of the 1% was not economic but social.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

People (and Israeli judges) hate ambiguity

One of the big issues that exercises everyone is leakage. Ofwat looked at this dispassionately, as you might expect. The thing is that it costs pretty much the same to fix a leak whether it’s a pinhole or a major mains burst; so we evolved a measure called the “economic level of leakage” (ELL). This was the level of leakage where it was actually cheaper to bring a new water source into supply to compensate for leakage losses than it is to actually go out and track down and repair every leak. We commissioned some research into public perceptions on this matter, and it taught me something important about public opinions. We (well, the consultants we got to do this for us) put together a focus group and asked them “Should all leaks be fixed, irrespective of cost or size of leak?” and then looked at how many people agreed with that. They were then briefed about the ELL measure, with worked examples to explain the concept in terms that anyone could understand. The focus groups were even asked if they understood what they’d been told, and nearly everyone said “Yes”. And then they were asked the original question again – should all leaks be fixed regardless? And despite everything that had been done to explain it, almost exactly the same number of people as before said “Yes”. People prefer their firmly-held beliefs to clear and incontrovertible facts.
 by Robert Day.

Volatility is No Risk

It is very common to equate the volatility (sigma) of a share with its riskiness. Quote from Investopedia:
Volatility is a statistical measure of the dispersion of returns for a given security or market index. Volatility can either be measured by using the standard deviation or variance between returns from that same security or market index. Commonly, the higher the volatility, the riskier the security.
What does it mean "commonly"? As for me, volatility is risky only for the investor that is forced to cash its share at a certain date. If the investor is free to wait out the low cycle (the price tends to regress to the mean, doesn't everything?) and he has patience - sigma is no risk at all.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Tremble! Repent!

The End is Near

Paul Krugman: "the axis of climate evil is now firmly in control of U.S. policy, and the world may never recover."

Restauration is not working


HaAretz on Meat


The fishwrap HaAretz, in its non-stop campaign to occupy the moral high ground and humiliate the Netaniyahu government has found a new item to pound home Israeli cruelty. Under the local animal rights movement attack, the government had agreed to restrict the import of live animals and instead to buy frozen meat. I don't understand how that will reduce the slaughtering of cattle or the total of animal suffering, but anyway, there was a 100 calves shipment from Hungary and some of them died on the way. It cannot be on purpose because each death means monetary loss to the owners. Today's fishwrap harps about the cruelty of the Agriculture Minister and by extension, the evil government. HaAretz assumes the mantle of protector of "the rights of those who cannot speak". This time they mean animals.

BTW, I never buy fresh meat but frozen Polish meat. I did not realize that it was the moral thing to do. It also costs less.

Back to the Blogosphere

A year ago I erased my blog but I miss it and want to restore it. Not sure it is possible.