During recent interviews that I heard on radio stations, the police have confirmed that thieves using jamming devices are targeting schools to steal parents’ motorcars. Apparently, because the parents often leave the car, they are ideal targets and the thieves are utilising jamming devices to make sure that the remote control does not lock the car properly. In other words somebody knows they have pressed the button to lock the car, and assume that the car has been locked, but a jamming device has prevented that signal from reaching the car.

This is a terribly frightening situation and people really have to guard against this very carefully because there are much worst things than your car being stolen – a parent for example leaving one child in the car while stepping out a few metres to get another child or perhaps load luggage up in the back of the car and having their car, complete with a child inside, stolen. However advanced the technology gets, it seems that the criminals are always just behind with some or other new device or technique to try and steal what amounts to the hard work of others. We invest our time in earning money, and then the things we bought with that money are taken away by somebody else, who believes his or her role in life is to simply steal what belongs to others.

I am always fascinated by property prices, and of course there are a lot of surveys each year and each of them telling a different story. The Sunday Times reported on the biggest percentage increases, in value, over the past year. Naturally, a category like that is going to be won by an area with a relatively low price that has gone up quite substantially than an area that, for example has an average price of R10 million and where prices go up R1 million during the year is only going to see a 10% increase whereas an area with a R500 000,00 average price, goes up to R750 000,00 while only showing a R250 000,00 increase is going to show a 50% return on one’s money.

In terms of return on one’s money, as a one year percentage increase, Broadacres in Fourways came first in South Africa. I have written quite a lot about developments in the area over the past year and so that is no surprise to me and of course there is still a major development of Douw Steyn City, where a blog I wrote on this development some time ago, continues to attract anonymous comments.
There is no doubt that the whole of Fourways, and probably Lanseria next, is the “new north” and that there is a considerable migration towards those areas, with a lot of young upwardly mobile people and developments, and so it was not a surprise to see Broadacres feature so well.

I think one of the long-term implications of Mitt Romney’s run to be the Republican candidate, is that there will be tax changes in America. It seems ludicrous, as it is being revealed, that the laws in America would change so that you pay much less tax on investment income, than on income from ordinary salaries and considerably less. Worse the definition of what is investment income is extremely generous to those working at big Wall Street firms.

In other words, wealthy people simply make investments, and then live off the income from the investments paying as little as 15% tax, while everyone else has to rely on their salary and pays let’s say 30% or 35% tax. The people who need the tax breaks the most don’t get it, and the people who should be paying the most tax, namely the wealthy, don’t pay it. I have written about this in my blog before, but it is no doubt going to become a bigger feature of the election for a man who is worth in excess of $250 million pays less than half the tax than the average American, and also pays, for example, considerably less tax each year than the current President Barack Obama pays. I think many wealthy Americans will ultimately regret Romney’s effort to become President because I think they will see tax hikes for “investment income” as they define it.

We have seen an incredible turnaround in the State’s policy to HIV in the last two years. ARV’s are being made freely available and the sites where they are made available have increased from 400 sites to over 2 000. Government no longer has a policy of denial of Aids. It is a tragedy, of course, that it took them so long to realise that it really does not cost much money to keep most people alive by giving them the correct treatment and that is one thing that Thabo Mbeki will have to explain one day.

Personal experience suggests that the new campaign is working very well – my staff members who used to obtain assistance and ARV medication from me via my pharmacy no longer approach me and it seems now that there is an acceptance of the disease. It was only about 5 years ago that I implored one of my staff members to get a family member to take ARV’s and they refused, insisting that it was TB and not Aids. The lady concerned died only a few months later, whereas I have been involved in other matters where people had CD4 counts as low as 90, who have totally turned around and are perfectly healthy many, many years later.

I had an entertaining evening recently, discussing with two advocates whose opinions I really respect, golf clubs, lightning and their duties to members insofar as their safety is concerned. This followed a request from a golf pro and given that the danger of lightning is a subject that I have written to two Clubs about previously, firstly Serengeti and recently to Country Club, Johannesburg, I thought it would be an interesting topic.

Consensus was that Clubs are going to lose the vast majority of legal cases that are brought against them but our approach, or our view of how the judicial system would get to those decisions, was quite different. The one advocate felt that I am clearly too much of a liberal – that it was my Wits University background which led to me taking an approach as to what decision a Court will reach when faced with a widow who has to support two children because her husband has just been killed, and a Club that has lots of assets, and probably an insurance policy as well. I think it is a very winnable case, each and every time depending on the facts, no matter what each disclaimer says, and the advocate agreed with me, but said he did not feel that it should be so in law.

What everybody agreed on was however that if Clubs are going to put in some level of protection, they are creating an impression that they are taking care of people, and creating a bigger onus on themselves. In other words, once you put in a lightning system with a hooter, clearly you are taking some responsibility, and once you do that, you are going to have to make sure that you do a proper job. The one advocate said that if he ran a Golf Club, but he admitted that very few people would be interested in being members of such a club, and it certainly would not be regarded in any way as prestigious for members to belong to, he would have no safety shelters at all, no lightning warning systems and a disclaimer that advises people that they must simply decide what they want to do, when they want to do it and the Club will have no responsibility at all. I don’t think most people would be happy to play at such a club and of course it automatically creates an impression of a Club that must have such terrible financial problems that it cannot even afford insurance.

In short, and that would be my advice to any Club if they ask me, is that if you are going to have a lightning system, and I think you must, then you have to make sure you build proper and secure lightning structures around your golf course as well as to ensure that that hooter or siren can be heard anywhere on the golf course so that you do not have some golfers playing a hole where it is not audible, for example once the wind has picked up. Some attorneys, especially those who take a robust litigious route to every case will say it is not necessary, but as Country Club Johannesburg found out, when it lost a case, we all felt that the vast majority of the time the Club will lose the case.

I think anybody who has ever been on a cruise ship before, can testify as to it being a very relaxed way to holiday. You don’t have to pack and unpack your bags as you go to one destination after another, and it is beautifully soothing to travel the seas, while waking to different sceneries every day. It does of course terrify one when one sees how quickly disaster can occur as in the Italian case.

The safety drills that I have attended on cruise ships really feel very tiresome and some of them have been done less seriously than others, but there was always some effort. I think passengers will take them more seriously in future and perhaps less begrudgingly. One automatically assumes that the routes you are going on generally involve calm waters and safe routes and that you are on the latest and greatest ship which simply cannot sink, but the latest incident involving the cruise ship Costa Concordia, reminds one of the reality. They are still just ships on the ocean and although they may be a lot safer than those of the last few hundred years, they are dangerous, particularly if your captain is busy wining and dining passengers, instead of checking what is going on with the ship.

I was lucky enough to have an escorted view of the inside of the control of one of the major cruise liners, and it was very high tech, with a number of staff checking out all sorts of different things and one wonders what sort of neglect must have occurred in the case of the Costa Concordia. Either way, I am sure passengers on cruise ships at the moment will probably wake up with more gentle rolls of the ship! Captain Francisco Schettino is obviously never going to work in the industry again, but it still appears to be a case of shocking neglect – or perhaps the complacencies that everybody has about these huge ships and safety.

It is one thing to charge appropriate tax and to pay it honestly, but it is of course another thing to spend it wisely and prudently. Taking three aeroplanes to accompany a State President on a trip to New York is ridiculous, even though one of the three planes only travelled halfway before turning back and the other two travelled the whole distance. It does appear that we seem to have some plane problems, when it comes to our President, but it is one thing to have a back-up plane but it is altogether another thing to have a second back-up as well!

One wonders sometimes whether this was not just a case of bad communication by government. For example, if the purpose was to test the planes or to train some pilots or staff in taking care of VIP’s, that would be easier to explain than trying to say you took two back-up planes! People are sometimes too apathetic about government spending, forgetting that ultimately it is money that was deducted from their salary!

I have spent a bit of time recently recording some shows for Expresso, which is flighted in SABC 3. One sometimes gets the impression that TV presenters have a glamorous and easy life, but from what I have seen, some of them, and certainly those working on the show, are working incredibly long hours. They are at work long before the show goes out at 5.30 am, and they are still recording inserts later into the afternoon. My interviews were done with Katlego Maboe and he certainly understood complex topics straightaway and was able to explain them in simple terms. I said to a friend of mine that he could really do anything he wanted and it was only subsequently that I researched and discovered that he is in fact, in addition to being a TV presenter, a singer and a qualified accountant. We are definitely going to hear a lot more of him as the years go by.

It is the movie time of the year, especially with the Oscars coming up, and George Clooney having already received his Emmy. I recently watched an award winner from last year, a documentary by the name of “Restrepo”, set in Afghanistan. It was a nominee for last year’s Oscars and it won the Grand Jury Prize for th documentaries at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

It is based on one of the most dangerous military bases the United States had in Afghanistan, because they have subsequently closed the base down, and it gives you a good idea as to the lifestyle of the soldiers and what they are going through. Marches through the countryside, up and down steep, rocky hills knowing that the enemy is around, but not knowing where they are, and being shot at basically everyday. The rest of the time it is really just about very young men doing gym and counting the days until they can get home. You never see the enemy and nor do they appear to, but there is lots of footage of them being shot at by unknown assailants, presumably Taliban and negotiations with villagers whose cow they have killed.
The soldiers certainly appear well-meaning in their efforts to capture the hearts and minds of the local community, but the average young man who has become a solder for a living and now spends his days inside a military compound with his fellow soldiers, is never going to be able to command the respect of elders in the local community, let alone have diplomatic or negotiation skills and while they are clearly sincere in their efforts, their skills are so lacking that one wonders how America ever hopes, apart from in one or two communities, to win the support of the local people.

It is hard to believe that robots can be so consistently out of order, at the same time of the year, every year. One would really think by now that the Johannesburg Municipality had some sort of system in place whereby they urgently send out teams to go and repair out of order robots. Sadly, at this time of the year, certain robots such as the intersection of William Nicol and Leslie Road have already been out of order for probably 20% of the month and that surely is unacceptable in a big city. Outsurance, who I understand is back on the job, have not been sighted that often recently either, so am not sure if they are reducing staff or that there are so many problems all over the place, that they are not getting to the routes I typically drive.

I am not an IT expert, but we all need to be. We live in a computer technology dominated world, and people without computer skills are going to find themselves less and less popular. In fact, these days you would certainly expect a staff member to be able to do some basic repairs to their computer, to restart it, and before calling in specialists to at least make sure that it is plugged in, and the printer they say is not working is actually connected!

I tend to get lazy as the year goes on, and do less and less of my own IT, but I spent quite a bit of time during December and January having to sort out problems with 8-ta, not to mention replacing monitors and trying to figure out what was eating all my bandwidth at home. That is when I learnt never to allow a young person to load a computer game on one of your computers because in this case it came with a community, a server and a programme called Steam, which continually downloaded massive amounts of data on my account which unfortunately is not an uncapped account. The game itself – well, I never saw that, but is meant to be very good – Call of Duty: Black Ops.

It has taken a long time for the police to confirm that Chanelle Henning’s husband is a suspect in her murder. It is one of those cases where you kept thinking it was only a matter of time before an announcement like that was made, because of the references to phone calls made.

It is the kind of shocking and disgusting act that really appals one. One wonders how any man, could so lose control of his mind, or be so out of control that he was not already locked up, that he can be paying people to go along and shoot his ex-wife and leave their child without a mother. No doubt we will find out in due course who is behind this and whether or not the husband is involved, and until then, people will speculate.

We only get one chance in life on this planet and it is terribly sad how many people there are out there that are prepared to organise the end of somebody else’s life and how many people will commit murder, for other people, simply for a fee as if it is a job. I don’t believe in the death penalty because there are just too many people who history has shown have been executed on the basis of tainted evidence, police set-ups and lying witnesses, but it is these types of cases that make one waiver a little. The appropriate thing, to my mind, is for whoever is behind it, if they have been caught, to go ahead and do the right thing and spare the State and society the costs of feeding and looking after them in a cell for the next 20 or 30 years.