Snow and Sluggish Recovery

The bitter cold and heavy snow fall around Europe and in the States seem to coincide with a very sluggish recovery indeed from the financial crisis. Greece and Spain are in great trouble for different reasons. Iceland is still struggling and others are running up huge debt. A very wide u dip.

China or Norway seem to be the places to be just now.

Remember the winter God? I say no more.

Can it last?

Just back from my first visit to Western Cape. I can hardly believe what I saw.

Very good roads.
Picturesque little towns with Dutch architecture.
Place names in Dutch, English and German.
Well run farms.
Affluent suburbs.
Good restaurants.
Excellent wineries.
Lots of busy people working, shopping.

This could be France, Germany or any European country.
But it is not. It is Africa - an Africa without black people.

Where are they?
Where do they - 80% of the country's population - live?

In Cape Town the answer is Khayelitsha township where more than two million still live the lecacy of Apartheid.
Segregated. Poor. In rickety shacks with few amenities. Hardly any transport to work and little work to be had.

There are many more like it all over the region.

Today, 16 years after the first ANC government took office there is still optimism but little change.

Why is that?

The Miser Index claims that a 1 per cent tax increase could eradicate poverty in South Africa.

Why does it not happen?

For how long will the majority be pacified by inadequate housing schemes and other morcels?

When will they claim a fair share of the land?

Zimbabwe got the redistribution of wealth all wrong.

Sout Africa must do it differently.

But they have to do it.

They are sitting on a time bomb.

I want to decide for myself which door to enter

MSN's UK portal has received much acclaim in a recent article in the Independent- and rightly so. It is is well designed, is very versatile and does pathbreaking stuff in its treatment of news. One of the best out there. But does it really give us/me what we are looking for? Is it so different from a thousand others that I would have it as my start page? The answer of course depends on who you are and whether it is versatility or tailor seam you are after.

Personally, with Google, Wiki, Free Dict and all the papers I need at my fingertips on the toolbar, my conclusion is bespoke. Versatility is the very nature of the internet and I find it a nuisance being automatically rerouted to a portal with bits and pieces from here and there. I don't want to be force fed anything. I want to decide for myself what to look at. If someone feel they must force me to look at something anyway, why can't they instead send me to a page or a portal catering to my needs?

So what am I looking for? I'm busy. Work long days. In my spare time I want to watch tv, movie on demand, I want exhibitions of interest to me, sales, information on gadgets, concerts, restaurants, discussions, a car show, sports - whatever. But what is on offer? I don't know and I don't want to waste time browsing the web to find out. Scanning Time Out and other available portals to map what is on that could interest me is just not possible. And they all come up with very general information anyway, with a bit of gossip and news thrown in for good measure. Consequently I miss most of the good opportunities.

I would like to see a site which compiles this sort of information for me from all available sources, offering thumbnails with links to dates, times and places for things I would be likely to do. And it would need to do this for me in the city where I live or in the one I am travelling to. So, when someone in Manchester or wherever has checked their hotmail they should be allowed to be sent to a page that tells them what they could do after work and what is coming up in two weeks and would interest them and which they would need to get tickets for now because there are only 50 left. There would still be room for some general gossip and news in a small section if the editor thinks this is a must. Or there could be the option of being sent to a tailored page instead of the general bric-a-brac page. You should be allowed to choose versatility, the news angle or the catering to your individual needs option.

Why can't I have a portal like this? Technically it should be easy, based on what people click on or from their actively setting up a profile. Why haven't the MS or the Google people (the thing in Chrome is nowhere near) come up with something like this? They are monitoring my mouseclicks anyway.

iPhone iPhone on the wall ...

The equipment we use is so out of step with our needs for quick everyday problem solving. We have the internet and fantastic it-applications for everything, but to access them we are basically left with machines not much different from what they were like 30 years ago; PCs that need ages to boot and plastic keyboards to input information. A household appliance that can free us from this extremely frustrating and user hostile environment is ages overdue.

The strange thing is that Apple has sort of invented it already. It is called the iPhone. A small beauty which potential has not been fully hatched yet. Why do they hesitate?

All they need to do is give it a 20 inch touch screen to be set in or hung on a kitchen or living room wall - or anywhere - possibly integrated with an Apple TV and with good loudspeakers or interface to audio equipment.

All set up, if I want to speak to aunt Mary – or see her – I go over and press the phone symbol and then her icon. If I want to access my favourite recipies there is an icon for that. If I want to know who is the king of Jordan I may have to type it in Google or maybe say 'Google' and 'king of Jordan' to the screen. If I want to check something in The Times I press that icon and to scroll through my favourite music as nicely as only the iPhone can do it, buy it at the Apple store, listen to Spotify or Slingbox a TV show to my iPhone handset, it is all there.

The iPhone is good, but the dimensions are all wrong for practical home use and I believe an appliance like this would be a godsend to most people. No more waiting for the screen to lit up (it is always on) and no more buttons to hammer, only the occasional virtual on-screen touch.

There may be a huge office marked for this as well, but the first stop is definitely home durables.

Please do it.

Green Shoots July 2009

The US unemployment figures are soaring and Schwarzenegger and colleagues are struggling to balance their budgets. Does re-election of Obama require another stimulus package? Also the slump in the UK turns out to be much worse than expected and Germany and Sweden have severely strapped state finances and their banks are highly exposed to the east. China has been remarkably quiet for a long time.

 

Surprising that all the bad news don't affect stock markets more. Have they priced in this and that already? It could be that all these traders really are expert macroeconomists with privileged access to information on impending recovery. It could also be that they have just become immune to the massively negative flow of information, hunch down to let the next log pass and concentrate on the daily trade.

 

By contrast the recession is not much felt in Norway - yet. Interest rates have been cut and boost spending on holidays and high street goods. A new housing bubble is on its way. Swedes and Poles still swarm here to get jobs. Fiscal stimuli have already been applied generously which will give us more of the same. There is a lot of latitude in a big oil fund. Probably only pockets of unemployment, falling import prices and banks hoarding money saves us from inflation. Stawberries are as expensive as ever.

 

Of course this country should do its modest bit to get the international economy growing again, but subsidized housing? Hardly the sector with the highest imports contents. Banks should probably rather lend to businesses, but there they are as prudent as financiers elsewhere in the world.

 

So, for how long can this country maintain its own private comfort bubble?

 

Just a reminder: there is also a general election this year.