Category: Philosophy

If you want real people don't make them wear a uniform.

We get invited to quite a few media things… Normally I don’t need to worry about what I wear. I have some smart stuff and some casual stuff. My “Beware of Squirrels, They’ll Steal Your Nuts” shirt was stolen, and that was the most “out there” thing I owned.

But now we’re invited to some or other launch and they’ve stipulated their dress code as “Elegant Casual, Jackets for Gents“.

This sort of thing makes me so angry I can not tell you…. and I know it’s really dumb that it irks me, but it does. I don’t wear jackets…. It’s just not me… but yet they want *me* to go…  so I have to dress up like someone else in order to fit into their stupid fancy dress party.

The world is a fascinatingly diverse place; Why on gods green earth would you want people to hide that diversity by all dressing the same? Hell, I only ever go to these things because of the interesting people, now I’ll have to actually *talk* to them in order to find out whether or not they’re boring-jacket-wearers.

over and out.

ps. You just know that some stinking-rich couldn’t-give-a-fuck-billionaire is going to rock up in shorts and a t-shirt.

The Internet – Don't Broadcast Yourself

The internet is about 2 way communication. A company that “broadcasts” but doesn’t enter into a dialog runs the risk of alienating their customers and appearing authoritarian.

Recently a bit of an online dispute arose when a local representative from a security company failed to adequately respond to some criticism from members of community mailing list that I’m on… not only did he fail, but when the pressure got too much he just disappeared and stopped responding to the list members questions.

Then a few days later the regional GM of the security company wrote a response, but instead of joining the list and posting as himself, ie. embracing dialog, he chose to ask one of the list moderators to post the email on his behalf. That undermines the dialog since no one knows whether he will ever read the replies.

While he did address some of the issues and make promises to meet with community, his email generally  felt a lot like something between a press release and damage control. It was impersonal and failed to address all the complaints.

However, my biggest criticism of the communication was the GM’s suggestion that people submit their issues or complaints in writing directly to the local representative instead of airing them on a public forum and asking for public response.

This is where I get up on my angry horse and start shouting. That’s the “old way”… this is the “new way”. In the “old way” you could tell each customer who complained “We’re sorry you had that experience but no one else is having a problem so it must be an isolated incident“… The “old way” isn’t going to work any more, and the more companies try and push people back to the “old way”, the more they’ll think you have something to hide.

The good news is that a company who embraces the “new way” can reap the rewards. If you respond on a public forum to one person’s issue you’re actually communicating with the entire group in a personal manner, and they all walk away thinking you’re a good guy who answers their questions and deals with their issues, even if you weren’t actually responding to a question they asked.

It remains to be seen what the fallout from this issue is, but it certainly isn’t having a positive effect on the company’s sales… especially since I need to decide which security company to use in a months time.

Traffic Fines & Fundamental Decency

Part the One:
Traffic fines have a habit of being illegible, however one wouldn’t expect this to carry over to the internet.

I by mistake RSIGN:STOPPINGNOM/VR217ed and it’s going to cost me R500, I just wish I knew what RSIGN:STOPPINGNOM/VR217ing was so that I can avoid doing it again.

Part the Two:
I generally give people the opportunity to be nice, but when they are not nice I generally come down on them like a ton of bricks. It’s how I am and I wish I wasn’t so all or nothing about my communication style.

Anyway, I have this little wager with a friend (at the moment it’s a beer but it should really be a bottle of Jamesons) that a perfectly polite, non-threatening, complaint email I sent to a certain company will not work. It was hard rewriting an email with the word ‘please’ in it when the previous version had some choice phrases like ‘shitty business practices’ etc in it.

I’ll keep you posted. Love that Jamesons.

Miracle Mops and the Egg Cracker 6000

Yesterday Lynnae and I went to the Homemakers Expo and the best thing about it was that I got a free back-issue Popular Mechanics which will live aside the toilet for the next few weeks. The second best thing was that we had media passes and didn’t waste R45 getting in.

I guess the problem with shows like this is that all the big vendors are totally over them. Why else would companies like Defy, Bosch, Smeg etc not be there? I can only imagine (as someone who has a tiny bit of trade show experience) that these companies learnt a long time ago that trade shows cost a bucketload of cash to put together and generally just frustrate your staff who end up having to work on weekends.

Nobody buys anything at trade shows, except, Wonder Mops (and other idiotic things like an egg cracking device).

Wait, picture this: We walk past a stand for something along the lines of “The Amazing Egg Cracker 6000”. Lynnae sighs and wants to walk on, but I, in a trainwreckian desire to hurt myself decide I *have* to know how they sell this thing. I walk over and ask for a demonstration. So the poor girl, who’s run out of eggs, begins “So what’s the problem with cracking eggs? Simple, you crack it on the side of the pan and egg ends up on your fingers, eggshells in the pan, and you invariably break the yolk!” she says, like she’s probably said over a thousand times in the last 5 hours. She looks up at me for that reciprocal head-nod.

I shake my head and say “Not really”.

She’s momentarily stunned by then carries on undeterred, “Well, with the Miracle Egg 6000 that’ll never happen again, you just put the egg in the device and squeeze the handle and instantly you have a perfectly cracked egg.”

“Thanks” I said as I walked away. I imagine that this is a wonderful invention for people with physical disabilities but for everyone else I think you’d be better off just buying 6 eggs and practicing on a Sunday afternoon. I’ve perfected (with a little help from my private chef) the single egg separation technique where you separate the egg white and yolk with the egg shell… Gotta learn how to do that with one hand though.

But, slightly more mind blowing than the egg cracker 6000 is the perpetual rollout of Wonder Mops and Miracle Orange Fibre stuff. The perveyors of this modern day snake oil have their routine so slick that you find yourself entranced by the bright colours and the disturbingly charming man with the Britney Spears microphone and smooth talking demeanor who occationally winks at the woman in the front row.

I was reminded of the old Westerns where the travelling salesmen stands beside his wagon and annouces his miracle cures for athritis and the black lung. Often telling the townsfolk that it is the most popular thing in the big cities and was invented in New York!

If there is one thing I remember from my youth (and we’re talking 20 years ago now) it’s the miracle mops, incredible dirt trapping floor mats and designed by NASA multicoloured dusters being sold at tradeshows (like Design For Living etc)… WHAT THE HELL DOES NASA NEED A MULTICOLOURED DUSTER FOR?

People! Nothing has changed in the past 20 years… Just like your multi-action, triple-flex, anti-bacterial, pro-enzyme, plaque-fighting toothbrush with the matrix-eque 3D graphics advertisements, everything at tradeshows is a big lie to make you pay too much for crap you don’t actually need.

Which is why the people who sell stuff you do actually need aren’t at the trade shows.

over.

Mail and Guardian letting it Slip (Knot)

I have the luxury of not being a journalist.

Mail and Guardian on the other hand doesn’t have that luxury. That’s why when I saw this: “Krugersdorp school rocked by ‘Satanic’ killing” I sighed quietly to myself. The article would be perfectly at home in Die Son and uses phrases like ‘crazy-eyes’ and ‘satanic-like ritual’

Here’s the deal. A kid who was obviously a little fucked in his head took a sword to school and stabbed a few other kids (one of whom died) and some of the school gardeners (who no doubt were trying to stop him). That is all. There is no need to try and justify his actions with claims of satanism or his music interests, or, for gods sake, the amount of time he spends on the internet. I’m sure he also played violent computer games; just like pretty much every other fucking kid in his school, who, for record, didn’t stab anyone with a sword yesterday.

These sorts of things happen, and they are tragedies, and they are possibly preventable, but not by censoring the kind of music your kid listens to, or freaking out because they bought a cheap sword at the Chinese knock-off shop around the corner, or banning the internet in your home. The only way to (possibly) prevent things like this happening is to be more aware of your child’s emotional well being, and, should you think your child might be a little nuts, get them to a psychologist who can either help them, or send your paranoid parent ass home because your kid is actually normal.

It seems like society is always looking for an excuse to justify our behavior. We blame MixIt for infidelity and computer games for violent kids… but we forget that a 70 years ago kids were being exposed to far more violence in the form of a World War and had access to more artillery than our current defense force, but they didn’t go to school and shoot up the classroom.

There’s also a stupid trend where people claim an unstoppable addiction to idiotic things like smoking, pornography and alcohol. They claim they have a disease because they can’t not buy that next box of smokes, or drink that next glass of scotch. Like Kyle so brilliantly said to his father in South Park, “No dad, you don’t have a disease, you just need to stop drinking so much”. If you don’t have the willpower to stop smoking, rather just admit to having no self control than muddying the waters for people with real  problems.

So please, journalists of the world, stop looking for reasons… back in the old days people were just plain old nuts if they stabbed their school friends … I liked those days. Can’t we please go back?

————–

Update: After a long discussion with Gavin, who knows a thing or two about mental issues, I must note that I agree that kids are doing this more now days than they were 100 years ago, and that the reasons for that must be something societal.

So maybe modern society (and everything that entails from bad foreign policy to violent movies) is to blame as the catalyst that triggers kids (and people) who are completely fucking nuts, to do stuff like this… but the key is, they were completely fucking nuts to start with.

The crux of my post was this; Journalism like this is likely to have a few thousand mothers confiscating their kid’s swords and slipknot CD’s, only further increasing the divide between them and their kids, which, will no doubt make them far less able to detect real signs of the kind of insanity that actually drives kids to kill their school friends, not to mention just plain old bad parenting.

Like Terri says, we want easy answers, not hard, complicated ones like ‘perhaps it’s a mixture of bad parenting and George Bush’s unjust war that kills thousands of innocent people every month, and violent movies and economic depression and the chemicals in our food and a bad case of ‘insane in the membrane’.

What's wrong with blogging these days

I started blogging about 10 years ago. Yes, way before the term ‘blog’ existed I had a website and I wrote stuff on it. I wasn’t the first either, I was just a guy taking advantage of the fact that the internet gave me a way to get my ideas “out there”… even if it meant that the only people who ever read my stuff were my 4 friends.

Problem #1 – Just because you’re on the internet doesn’t mean you matter.

Talking shit about people doesn’t make you famous or powerful. It seems that some people have confused ‘pissing people off’ with ‘having an influence’. If you’re going to talk smack you’d better have big balls to take the criticism. Also, don’t shit on your doorstep, it’s ugly and the people around you will find it hard to be your friend afterwards. As much as I’m all for honesty and freedom of speech, it needs to be leashed to a good dose of old fashioned decency.

Problem #2 – Sell outs

While I don’t take my blog all that seriously, I do take pride in it and wouldn’t polute it for any material gain, whether it’s pay-per-post or a stupid ‘viral’ campaign that results in someone winning a tshirt. If you want to run advertisements then by all means do so, but don’t sell your opinion to anyone, whether the price is a brand new car or a set of free stickers.

Problem #3 – Inane writing is clogging the tubes.

I’m not against anyone who wants to chronicle their life online. It’s fun looking back at your life through the eyes of your blog. I’m not talking about posts that are simply boring because the people who wrote them live boring lives. I’m talking about the kind of post that painfully chronicles your opinion on subject A, where subject A is something nobody cares about and your opionion only makes it more painful. We’re all allowed some boring posts every now and again. It’s an indulgence. The sad thing is that some people seem to repetedly push out these kinds of posts and never write anything even remotely interesting. That is why feed readers are so awesome; you can pick and choose who you want to read and leave out all the boring people. Still though, ask yourself this simple question before you hit “publish”… Will this matter to anyone, including myself, in 20 days time.

Arrogance and Incompetence aren't a good combo

Today I had my geyser replaced… the old one had blown. ACME plumbing (name withheld because the guy who runs it is a douche) was assigned by the rental agency to do the job. ACME plumbing pissed me off from the very first moment because they never called back when they said they would, took too long to get the job done and originally misdiagnosed the problem which meant I didn’t have hot water for about 5 days etc.

So ACME arrives with his two ‘boys’. Wilson was the more senior of the two. Wilson was tasked with removing the old geyser, which isn’t such an easy task, but he executed it flawlessly while the baas went to go fetch the new geyser. About 2 hours later Wilson and his friend had drained the geyser, removed it, prepped the space and helped me strip the old geyser down to the tank. (I’m going to cut it in half and use it as a herb garden at our new house)

The baas arrived with the new geyser and then took Wilson’s friend to go to some other job. Wilson fitted the geyser, again executed like an expert. He improvised a few things due to the new geyser being a different size but everything was neat, the wiring was done perfectly and he tested his work methodically. We had toast and coffee and chatted about plumbing. Wilson was a regular guy. Probably the most accurate representation of South Africa: a working class man trying to catch a break, but never getting one. He had been a plumber for 12 years but didn’t have his papers because they cost money to get… and the boss wasn’t interested in helping. He explained how the boss kept a record of what time they finished every day, so if they finished at 4:00pm he would mark it down and on Friday deduct the collective hours from that week’s wage.

Then it came time to put the cupboard they had dismantled back together (The geyser is under the kitchen sink). Wilson put everything together expertly, taking care not to damage anything even though some of the chipboard was wet and brittle. I helped with putting the cupboard doors back on because it’s not easy to do by yourself. We struggled to get the doors level, partly because the one hinge was slightly damaged. We improvised a solution which worked well and we eventually got the doors perfect enough where we were both happy.

Just then Wilson’s phone rang. It was the baas; Wilson explained that he had been struggling with the cupboard door but that it was okay now. Wilson looked strangely at his phone. The baas had ended the call while Wilson was still speaking.

Seconds later the intercom rang. It was the baas. I had to go down to let them in as the front door wasn’t opening properly. In the lift he said ‘That’s what’s wrong with this country, everyone has two left thumbs and no nuts’. I bit my tongue.

Walking in the door he aggressively confronted Wilson, telling him that he must have messed up the doors and that the one was missing a screw. Wilson submissively tried to explain that he hadn’t lost any parts and that the one hinge wasn’t working properly. The baas sat down and ordered a screw driver. He removed the door and then started saying things like ‘You didn’t put it on properly, that’s why!’… only to swing the door closed and have it hopelessly skew. This carried on for a few minutes while the baas again and again explained that the job wasn’t done right in the first place. At some point he accused Wilson of damaging his tools. “What’s this rubbish?” he asked while removing our improvised solution.

Eventually I walked away, catching a wry smile on Wilson’s face as I left. The baas was a dick, and Wilson and I both knew it… in that moment we were one person. No amount of macbooks or fancy cars could divide us. Nyanga and Observatory became a little closer and the colour of our skin was irrelevant. We were one person laughing at the arrogance of another.

Eventually the baas closed the cupboard door and said ‘Right, lets pack up’… I stood there gob smacked. The door was completely skew and the gap was wider than it had ever been.

‘Um’, I said, ‘You can’t tell me you’re going to leave it like that’.

‘Well, I’m not exactly a joiner, I can’t be expected to fix cupboards’ he replied… ‘Don’t judge me on my joinery, rather judge me on the geyser I fitted’.

I laughed, ‘You mean the geyser Wilson fitted’…

Here begins my soliloquy, which I hope I can remember accurately. Racism and arrogance tend to make my blood boil but I’m always rather eloquent when it happens.

“You expect me to judge you on the geyser, that Wilson fitted, but you’ve been nothing but rude to him the whole time. Then you arrogantly decide you can do a better job at fitting a door, which apparently you can’t because when you walked in here the cupboard door was near perfect, now it’s completely wrong and you expect me to be okay with all that? Look, you can leave, I’ll fix the cupboard, but I want you to know that I’m disgusted by your attitude.”

Now it was Baas’ turn to be gob smacked.

“I’ll fix it” he said like kid after a beating.

He replaced our jury rigged improvisation and with a little bit of help from Wilson was able to get the door to a point where it was good enough to leave. It still wasn’t as good as Wilson and I had got it, but it was close.

“That ok?” he asked.

“It’s fine” I said.

I realise now that perhaps it isn’t racism that drives this guy to be such a dick, perhaps he’s just a douchebag bully to everyone around him that can’t fight back. I hope the universe treats him to a nice dose of karma one day. In the mean time, if you need a good plumber on a weekend, I have Wilson’s number.

I’m off to have a shower.

Benny Hinn is a swindler and a thief…

Benny Hinn is a swindler and a thief and it is high time that honest, god fearing christians spoke up against him. The ridiculousness of the church (as a community) not calling him on his outrageous fraud —  because he’s a ‘christian’ and they don’t want to ‘judge’, is perhaps only slightly more stupid than far right christians believing that George Bush is ordained by god to return America to its christian roots.

There is only one thing more insipid than people who are stupid enough to give their money to this charletan, and that is people who know better but prefer not to rock the boat. Good men are doing nothing.

“Everyone had to donate $1 000 because an exceptional blessing rested on $1 000.”

Read the News24 article here.

(Note to the reader: These sorts of antics, and the church’s general acceptance of it, do nothing to redeem the church, or its religion, in my eyes. Feed for poor, clothe the naked, for God’s sake.)

Buying Property Step 1 – When to buy.

Boilerplate Introduction: I’ve only just bought a house and I don’t claim to be any kind of expert. What I’m writing here is merely the things I learnt along the way… sometimes they might be blatantly obvious and other times they can be quite surprising. Because I’m no expert, please feel free to leave a comment if I’m wrong or you think I’m missing something. I wanted to write this now, before the shock and awe has subsided and before the lingo and concepts become too common place to seem unusual.

The obvious answer to the “when to buy” question is “When the prices are at their lowest and when the interest rate is about to start coming down“… That’s obviously hard to predict, but there are some things that will help you.

Low prices are caused by a few things:

  • Overstock: There are too many houses on the market and sellers drop their prices in order to be more competitive than the place down the road.
  • Tough Times: In tough financial times there are fewer buyers. When there are fewer buyers you need to entice them by lowering prices.
  • Overstock, Tough Times and Desperation: This is the trifector. Tough Times cause more people to sell which causes Overstock which causes people who really need to sell to push their prices down. Its a very uncomfortable place to be for a seller and one would assume that most sellers would just try and weather the storm… but, as you can imagine, not everyone can…

Why People Sell Their Property

You get a few different types of sellers and understanding them can explain the market and help you predict when and how things are going to pan out.

  • Distressed Sellers: These are the guys who have either lost their jobs or bought at the maximum amount that their banks would allow and are now unable to meet their monthly payments because the interest rates have gone up 5.5%.  On a 1 million rand bond, 5.5% means your monthly payment went from R8 970 to R12 790 (Roughly R4000 per month). These guys risk forclosure from the bank… which essentially means the bank will auction the house at less than it’s worth and force the owner to pay the difference. ie. Lose everything you’ve paid into your house and end up with a crapload of debt and a very bad credit record. This is where you’ll usually pick up property at very low prices. I’m glad I didn’t need to buy property from a person like this, I would have felt too bad.
  • Investment Sellers: These guys have money and probably a few properties. They bought back in the day and are probably renting the place out. Investment Selllers understand that the market will always recover and they’re willing to wait it out. These guys are responsible for the R900 000 properties on the market that suck more than the R600 000 properties. They’ll leave it on the market at R900 000 until the market corrects itself or until some poor idiot comes along and pays R300 000 too much for the place.
  • Liquifying Sellers: These are the guys who are trying to turn some of their assets into cash so that they can start a company or buy a yacht etc. They’re not as price concious as investment sellers but they also won’t settle for less than they paid. They usually have other options.
  • Moving Up Sellers: This is typically a couple who have outgrown their house or want something better. They might even have bought another place already on the condition that they sell their existing place first. These guys can be quite desperate but are also not stupid. They have nothing to lose other than the chance to move into the home they really want. They’re also flexible and understand that property prices fluctuate so they might loose R50k on the place they’re selling and score R100k on the place they buy.
  • Weird old ladies with bug phobias. You will occasionally run into some odd people selling their properties, especially when they’re selling privately. They can be harmless but can also waste a lot of your time. They typically overvalue their property because they haven’t had a property agent give them a reality check with a clue-by-four yet. I can’t imagine how painful it would be to actually try and buy a place from one of these people.
  • FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is an interesting aspect to all of this… Assume you bought a house 5 years ago for R400k, 2 years ago it was worth a million, but now agents are saying that the market is getting worse and your house will only fetch R900k. With looming interest rate hikes there’s a chance that before you know it your house will be work R800k. If you are not willing to wait out the next cycle (4-8 years) you might want to sell now while you might still get R900k.

The reason you need to understand the sellers is because it will help you put a price in perspective and know what a reasonable offer would be. You’ll usually be able to spot the sellers motives by looking at the house and asking the agent.

Value Cycles

The important thing to recognise is that Interest Rates have a direct impact on property prices.

There is supposedly a 5 year cycle in property, but the last boom was about 5 years ago… maybe more depending on who you ask. I think the cycle does definitely exist, but I think it is sped up or slowed down by other factors like Interest Rates, Inflation Rates, Politics, General Happiness, Voodoo etc.  I also think that the market is self-fulfulling to some extent. In other words, if enough analysts predict higher sales, people go and buy houses.

I think the cycle is anything between 4 and 8 years… the trick is obviously in knowing how to predict the troughs and peaks.

It seems that we might have just hit the bottom of one of those troughs. Analysts are slowly starting to predict better outcomes and Investec says that StatsSA have overstated inflation and the interest rate should proabably be 2% less than it is right now. To put that in perspective, that 2% represents about R1500 per month on a million rand loan. If the interest rate drops by the full 5.5% that it gained in the past few years it brings things down a lot more. But that is truly the BIG IF.

The bottom line seems to be to buy at the very bottom of a trough or while prices are going down… if you’re ready. Don’t get suckered into buying when prices are on their way up in case they go so high you’ll never be able to afford to own property… That’s the FUD speaking.

Over and out.

j

Investment Brokers

Don’t trust some monkey in a fancy suit who couldn’t cut it as a CA and became a financial advisor. They usually have one area of expertise… You want an island holiday and they know Mauritius… guess where you’re going on holiday? Get on the internet and research. If you’re bright you might even know more than that broker within the week.

(My advice for a friend)