The first step that big corporations take is to replace people with machines. Unfortunately, in trying to save the cost of people, they don’t seem to ever spend any money fixing the parking machines. On a recent visit to Sandton I walked first to one parking machine to pay, and when that did not work, I walked to another machine, which also did not work. It was only when I got to the third machine that I was actually able to pay for the parking. Of course, Nelson Mandela Square and Sandton City don’t have much competition, which is why they can get away with leaving the same parking machines in a state of disrepair, and people will still return there.

I guess that one of the problems of living in a smaller country is that there is not that much competition, and in many respects we are forced to put up with unacceptable service.
 

Speedtest.net is quite a useful site and I enjoy testing the speed of my Internet provider. I use the services of both MWeb and Telkom and recently the Telkom lines have certainly been very spotty.
Some of the download speeds I get, and this is on a computer that is not being shared with anybody else, have been very low and on www.speedtest.net , I have discovered for example that my speed has been running as low as 0,4 mbps, on what is meant to be a 4 mbps line! In other words, I am running at 10% of the full speed!

It is no wonder that one reads articles that the wealthy are seeking out the Dalmation Coast in Croatia. It is very much similar to Cape Town, in terms of its beauty, only prettier and with the warm Adriatic sea in which you can actually swim!

The water is a beautiful temperature and the town of Dubrovnik is bustling in summer, filled with energy, young confident people and overall it has a sexy vibe of summer. Whether or not there is plenty to do over 3 or 4 weeks, is another story, but my one day there certainly left me wanting to go back. Of course, only 15 to 20 years ago they were involved in a civil war fighting largely Serb forces who were raining down bombs on their city. If you walk along the wall of the old town it gives dramatic views and also leaves one thinking about how so many societies undergo dramatic changes and indeed wars.
 

Recently I read a book by Jeff Colbin, who is one of the editors of Fortune magazine, and the book which is titled, “Talent is Overrated”, basically that we need to practice hard. Practice of course is not as simple as that, and it is practice in specific ways to achieve specific goals that really counts. He gives examples of people like Mozart and Tiger Woods, both of whom essentially began practicing the fields in which they would sell, at extremely early ages and in both cases were coached by their fathers who had experience in that regard.

It seems that if pushed in the right direction, and trained properly, all of us can achieve essentially anything – naturally, if we have a desire and the capability to work hard. Of course, any book selling an inspiring message like that is going to do well!

NewsWeek chooses best countries in the world to live in (Pinny this week obviously)

The latest edition of NewsWeek will no doubt create some controversy with its list of the 100 best countries in the world to live in. Finland comes in first and South Africa is at 82 – long behind countries such as – well, even Poland, which is in the mid-20’s. We also lag considerably behind all of the former Soviet countries as well as Russia, etc. The survey takes into consideration, amongst other things, the opportunities for a child growing up in the country, the health sector, the education sector, etc and South Africa was clearly found to be lagging behind these countries in all of these aspects.
 

Over recent weeks Telkom is apparently upgrading the 4 mbps lines to 10 mbps, where the lines and exchanges support that. Obviously, the internet speeds in South Africa are really beginning to lag international standards, so a more than doubling of download speeds is really going to be fantastic, although we will still be uploading at only 1 MB. As most of the companies do get their internet capacity from Telkom in the first place, one assumes that the competitors such as Mweb will also be upgrading their speeds shortly and we will all be surfing the internet at close to two and half times the speed we are now. Once expects, in an age of technology, that speeds would increase on a regular basis, but we have waited for this increase for almost 2 or 3 years now, and one must hope that the next increase will be next year, considering the amount of international cables currently being laid to South Africa.

Whenever I see Venice I am reminded of the fact that it once was essentially the trade capital of the world, and ruled much of the world. It really must have made the most awesome and dramatic appearance for ships, when they sailed through Venice 500 years ago, because even today it is incredibly dramatic and even more so when seeing Venice from a ship – and many ships sail right through the heart of Venice for beginning or ending a cruise.

The latest edition of NewsWeek will no doubt create some controversy with its list of the 100 best countries in the world to live in. Finland comes in first and South Africa is at 82 – long behind countries such as – well, even Poland, which is in the mid-20’s. We also lag considerably behind all of the former Soviet countries as well as Russia, etc. The survey takes into consideration, amongst other things, the opportunities for a child growing up in the country, the health sector, the education sector, etc and South Africa was clearly found to be lagging behind these countries in all of these aspects.

Recently, I have been having non-stop problems with my ADSL modems, both at the office and at home. I am advised that the number to the left of the CRK number that Telkom gives you, indicates where you are in the queue and at my offices I am approximately number 520 and at my house number 322 – which probably explains why I have intermittent, on-and-off Internet, for more than 2 weeks without it being repaired. Essentially those numbers mean that there are major Telkom problems all over Johannesburg at the moment, and their technicians simply cannot get to all the places to fix them. I personally suspect it has something to do with the upgrading of the lines from 4 MBPS to 10 MBPS.

I see that the rising search terms on Google now include a movie, namely Inception and quite a few related to soccer: Kaizer Chiefs, Laduma, Telkom (presumably the Telkom tournament) and Chelsea.

Every year, the media in South Africa lament the fact that the Nedbank Golf Challenge field is weaker than usual. I am not sure what they compare it to, because every year they allege that it is weaker than usual, and I think if there was to be any substance in what they write, the field must then be weak, and they would then be able to say the same as usual!

In any event, and I have written about this before, it appears year after year that those who play in the Nedbank Challenge do very well the next year on the year’s world circuits and this year has been no exception with the latest event in the World Golf Championships, being won by Hunter Mahan, this past weekend, who of course played at Sun City. It is Hunter’s second win for the season and others who featured at Sun City, and have been in tremendous form this year include Retief Goosen, Tim Clark who then went on to win the Players Championship and Robert Allenby.
 

It seems, wherever you go, you will come across Eastern Europeans, and by that term I would be talking about the former Soviet bloc countries, naturally including Russia. In Turkey, the shop assistant who helps you might be married to a Ukranian, and on the Greek Island of Santorini, your Moldavian waiter will tell you that most of the actual work in Santorini is done by Eastern Europeans and that he has moved there, together with his Bulgarian wife.

The next stop that you will visit will be run by a Ukranian woman who has married a local Greek and works in the shop selling goods to the tourists. It does not really come as a surprise to me, because I think that with the aging populations of countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and their very poor economies, that it is only a matter of time that they are going to have to open their doors and actively encourage a new flood of immigrants, like America did a century or so ago.

There seems to be, in many countries, a lack of desire of the local people to work for wages that are not much more than the benefits that they are used to (not that they can afford those benefits any more) whereas only a few thousand kilometres away, there are literally millions of people who would welcome a fresh start and work at those same salaries. In some ways, South Africa would also benefit from trying to attract such workers, but in that regard I would be suggesting the more skilled workers of the types we have lost in such huge numbers – ranging from doctors to nurses and engineers.
 

My wife and I both recently finished a book by Douglas Rogers, called “The Last Resort: A Memoire of Zimbabwe”. This in itself is a rare event – we both seldom finish the same book, within a few days. Douglas Rogers is a Zimbabwean journalist, living in New York, and has written about his parents’ lodge, Drifters, just outside Mutare in Zimbabwe.

It is an easy read and it is material with which most South Africans will be familiar with, although not in the detail that the book goes into. His parents’ lodge has been a home to a variety of people ranging from backpackers, and when they dried up, to farmers who had been thrown off their farms and then onto prostitutes and diamond dealers. They have had encounters with war veterans, and hopefully will not have any more as a result of the publication of this book, because they still live at Drifters and are revealed as MDC supporters in their son’s book. Amongst other things that I would not have published if I were his son, includes the father’s knowledge of the marijuana crops that are growing in the back garden at Drifters, instead of maize! It is an unusual read, describing the rough decade Zimbabwe has been through recently and perhaps the back cover puts it best when it says, “An edgy rollercoaster adventure, it is also a deeply moving story about how to survive a corrupt Third World dictatorship with a little innovation, humour, bribery and brothel management.”
 

A website started five years ago, largely for people to complain about the Bush administration, has become one of the biggest successes of the Internet age in terms of the future of journalism. The site, The Huffington Post, run by Arianna Huffington, attracted 24 million unique visitors during the month of July 2010 alone.

Interestingly enough, despite that huge audience, the HuffPo site makes just over $1 per reader per year. The site invariably mixes links, videos and slide shows, together with reader comments to tell a story, and with its developers all over the world, the site is essentially kept going 24 hours a day. Approximately 40% of the articles that the site runs are obtained from other sites – so it is not necessarily creating its own content.

One of the things that interest me, because I do feel that a lot of websites allow a very ugly, free for all, in the name of “freedom of speech” is that the company employs 20 staff whose only job it is to remove nasty comments because while the site recognises that people want to participate these days, and not just consume information, the site’s policy is to keep things civil – something I believe in.
 

I love being at home in Johannesburg, but if there is one time of the year I would rather be at the coast or in another country, it is probably now. No rains, fires burning grass and winds sweeping up dust into the air mean that not only is it allergy season, but there are visibility problems and the wonderful blue sky we normally see seems to have been photo-shopped with a grey layer laid over it and blended so that only the smallest amount of blue remains. I get sick at this time of the year and almost every year with some or other infection that invariably starts in the chest, and I have to say I cannot wait for the rains – although I know that they are anything from 6 to 8 weeks away.

I recently read a very enjoyable book called “Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance” by Alexander Zaitchik. Glenn Beck is probably the best known person, apart from Sarah Palin, that is involved with the whole Tea Party movement in America which aims to select its own Republican representatives and move America back to what it “should be” in their narrow minded, conservative vision. The Tea Party was essentially brought to prominence by Rick Santelli of CNBC during a broadcast of CNBC from the trader’s floor.

What Beck is particularly good at is building a brand by selling fear – fear that “they” have already taken over America, that the government is under “foreign influence” and that the socialists are in control of America. His supporters frequently invoke Satan and all manners of evil when talking about Barack Obama, who they continue to try and suggest was not even born in America – to the extent that one of them even brought a court challenge to stop him being inaugurated as President, on this basis, just before the inauguration.

The book is a superb analysis of the Glenn Beck’s rise from being a top 40 DJ – in other words, essentially playing music on a radio station, to where he is now a leading political commentator on Fox News, although as the author notes, “If the dummying down of political commentary continues along this trajectory, the next plunder to make the grade will be a hyena.” Beck in particular frequently makes reference to black people or accuses Obama of being racist, and in one way or another, makes references that white conservative political voters understand to be anti-Democrat, anti-Obama and anti-black people. I watched the man on television with my wife, long before I read anything about him, and we both thought that he was visibly disturbed, although allegedly he has used his Mormon faith to train him in theatrics and wonderful, teary speeches – he frequently breaks down and cries during radio shows or TV programmes whenever it comes to anything that he feels is very important to America.

One of the more notable quotes from the book is from Phil Plate who said of Beck that, “His intellectual capacity is clearly such that he shouldn’t even be allowed to rant in public parks to passing squirrels.” You might find all of this a little bit arbitrary, but as a follower of American politics I can tell you that he is a hugely powerful man in America and a lot of their supporters are already holding up placards that read “Palin/Beck 2012”. The thought that Sarah Palin could be President of America and this man Vice President makes learning about both of them quite important – unless horror stories really scare you.
 

I have been somewhat surprised about how slowly the Kindle is taking off in South Africa. Apple seems sure that their iPad is going to challenge it, but I am not so sure that that will be the case. Amazon’s product was launched first, it is most probably better and easier to read than a colour device and it has the resources of Amazon’s retail expertise and supply. I don’t think that people realise that firstly it holds thousands of books, secondly they get delivered to you wirelessly over the cellular network of whatever country you are in and thirdly, wherever you can get a cell phone signal, you can order a book.

In other words, I have literally been sailing in the ocean, past a country, and have ordered a Kindle version of a book, simply by clicking on it and had that book download to my Kindle within a minute. There are more than 400 000 titles to choose from in South Africa (600 000 for Americans), at the time of writing this, and essentially every best-selling book has a Kindle version which means, wherever I am, I have a mobile bookstore that sells me books at an average price of approximately $10 or $12 within 60 seconds. 

I can highlight passages that are important to me, to quote at a later stage, and I can also see, which is quite interesting, which passages in the book have been highlighted by the most readers so far. If I have a Kindle nearby, and remember I don’t have to pay anything for its wireless capabilities as that is built into the price of the book, I will never be short of anything to read and I won’t be at a disadvantage if I am in a country where they don’t sell many English magazines or books or indeed in South Africa, where I might have to wait 6 weeks for Exclusive Books to import the book for me in the first place. Amazon has released a new, cheaper version of the Kindle, and it is only a matter of time, I am sure, before there is a version available that costs less than $100 at which time, hopefully, they will take off. I say “take off” – it is a number one selling device on Amazon for two consecutive years now already, but I am really referring to taking off in South Africa.
 

Larry King, on CNN, has announced his retirement and his show, after many years, is coming to an end. He will obviously have a lot of fans in South Africa because we did not have many TV channels when CNN launched, and then the first Gulf War kept many of us up till late at night watching the development of the war and becoming familiar with Larry King and all the people that he interviewed – as well as all the candidates who announced their election campaigns and running mates for the first time on his show. It is certainly not the influential programme it once was, but her certainly had a show to be proud of and with 7 or 8 wives, an interesting life altogether!

I wish there were more services in South Africa that allow you to print your photos easily. I found two great sites in America, the first being Wallhogs and the other is Canvaspop. You can access Canvaspop at www.canvaspop.com and basically they allow you to print any picture onto canvas – and even take a cell phone in, and blow it up – to as much as 7 foot and Wallhogs which site is at www.wallhogs.com allows you to print your photos including on reusable wall vinyl and essentially, for example, take a picture of a towel, cut it out, blow it up to 4 or 5 feet and then stick it to a wall. All of these services, like the book publishing site www.blurb.com allow you to load up your pictures over the Internet and then deliver them to you. It is a great pity that there are not competing, competitive products in South Africa and if there are please let me know under the comments!

I had not hit a golf ball for a little over two weeks recently, and when I went to practice, I found that my game has really gone backwards, and I was struggling to connect the ball properly. Professionals of course would practice 7 or 8 hours or in Tiger Woods’ case, 11 hours a day, each and every day, which is one of the many reasons why, apart from lack of talent, the rest of us have no hope of achieving what they do! It is also a good reminder for me that one must do what one is good at, and it never ceases to amaze me how in my field, where we are excellent at personal injury cases, how many people who clearly don’t have a clue as to what they are doing, try to participate in the work and really make disasters of cases. In short, what I am saying is that more attorneys, more professionals and people in general should not try to take on work that they are not good at, and that they are not practicing on a daily basis. Personal injury cases, developments in court and the general practice, which you cannot read about in a book, change each and every day, and somebody who has not done a case for 6 months or 1 year, is extremely unlikely to be up to date and able to deliver the same service. Almost every time I am called upon to sue an attorney for negligence, it is almost always because that attorney is trying to do a little bit of divorce, a little bit of personal injury, a few contracts here and there as well as conveyancing and transfer of property.

I see Planet Fitness has made the media recently, with its collecting agents apparently having being asked to tackle a R350 million debt that they have by proceeding against clients. The problem is that apparently their contract provides that the membership does not automatically expire at the end of the one or two-year term – but continues on a month to month basis. Planet Fitness, according to media reports, calls this “auto renewal”. In other words, you take out what you think is a one year membership and you don’t renew it after one year, but in fact it then continues on a month to month basis if you do not terminate it in writing. People are now getting called, in some cases years later apparently, to pay and not surprisingly, they are very unhappy about this. It is another reminder to read contracts very carefully and don’t just take notice of what the sales person tells you (or omits to tell you).

On 13 August Super Sport will be launching SSHD2, a second HD sports soccer channel, with live commentary in English and Portuguese, that will broadcast all 318 matches in the English Premier League each year, for three years, and 180 of them will be live. I am sure that this new HD channel, which will be broadcast on Channel 174, is going to be another compelling reason for more and more people to get HD.

It is somewhat surprising to discover that the number one Google searches in South Africa are still Facebook and Facebook login. What that says for us as a nation I am not quite sure, but Jobs was down at position number 8, way below references to Gumtree, Gmail and of course Facebook, which dominates the top two search terms. Interestingly enough, Twitter, which is somewhat described as a Facebook for adults, although I am not sure that I would agree with that, does not feature in the top 10 at all.

People always talk about how the future of advertising is on the Internet, but new figures are beginning to show that whilst traditional advertising is dwindling, not much more is being spent on the Internet advertising either. It seems that advertisers don’t want to spend that much on paying for advertisements that people click. Advertising rates for online advertising have been dropping for a decade now and rates per 1 000 impressions for an advertisement, have in most cases dropped 20% from last year.

In some cases, like the social networking site Facebook, the rate according to ComScore is apparently only 56 cents per 1 000 impressions. It seems that advertisers take the approach that not many people click on Internet ads, or even notice them, and that is certainly my case – I cannot remember when last I clicked on an Internet advertisement on the side of an article – and after having read one, I would not be able to tell you whose advertisements appear alongside the article. Newsweek quoted Michael Wolff as saying, “Maybe it is time that someone says the unsayable – that online advertising just does not work. A website turns out to be a not very good advertising vehicle.”
 

It seems the media manipulates everything these days into 10 or 20 second sound bytes, and while that suits our fast-paced world, that really does get in the way of the facts sometimes.

My wife gets irritated every time she sees a movie about World War II, which all generally end with the Americans winning the war. There is never a mention of the fact that the German army had been brought to its knees on its eastern front taking on Russia and that in terms of deaths, Russia suffered far more than any other country in defeating Germany. It is the same when publicists issue their press releases claiming that a golf course, holding a tournament, is now number one. Number one in what? Number one when? It is all a distortion of reality and on the one hand, with less people reading than ever before, maybe it does not affect that many, but on the other hand it is a pity that quite often the real facts do damage the story – so they are ignored just to attach the label of “winner” to the wrong party or number one to the wrong organisation, team or event.
 

I have always excelled at keeping my clients updated with the Road Accident Fund claims that we do. I have recently, and to make the information more available, put up our Quick Guide to the Road Accident Fund process on our website at www.accidentclaim.co.za  and you can download it for free in a PDF format from that site if you would like to read more about the process. The website also has a lot more information, results and indications of some of the settlements we have achieved over the years.

I have noticed that some South African companies, particularly media companies where you subscribe, are not that good at following up relentlessly, to get you to renew your subscription. For example, Golf Digest will send you one reminder after another as would all the international magazines like Time, Fortune and BusinessWeek. Every time my Financial Mail, or FM subscription runs out, the only way to discover is that the magazine stops arriving – not a word from them to start again and one has to then call through to them and basically take out a new subscription. It is really a good way to lose business.

It seems that there is a never-ending supply of stories of children dying in hospitals. We get one excuse after another and the MEC says that no-one is to blame. I cannot possibly see how no-one is to blame for the spread of infection in hospitals and we have doctors telling the media that they don’t even get supplied with paper towels and soap to wash their hands. It is no wonder that medical malpractice cases are on the rise, and will continue to increase, just as traffic to my website www.personalinjury.co.za , which deals with many of these topics, does.

I see Julius Malema, who managed to keep quiet for almost the entire World Cup, is back on the scene and talking again. The media love him, because he always makes wonderful headlines, although I am not quite certain that he would have the same stance on freedom of speech as they would like. He is now talking about nationalisation of mines – a sensitive topic insofar as the economy is concerned, but there are those mine owners, and some are very well politically connected, who have not managed to make a go of things, or any profits, and would probably dream of having their mine nationalised! One must not assume that everyone who was involved in mining would be opposed to nationalisation – only those who are successfully involved in mining would have that attitude but, as with all businesses, there are many who are not successful and who are not doing well and would actually dream of the government taking over their operation, and actually getting a little bit of money out.

It seems to be that Embassies really are huge profit centres, in terms of the Visa fees that they charge. At an average rate of about R580,00 for a Schengen Visa, and with appointments having to be booked beforehand on the Internet and queued for, it seems that most Embassies are doing fairly well. They seem to turn over an application, from what I witnessed, about every 7 or 8 minutes, fitting at least 8 appointments into an hour and effectively each employee, while they are taking bookings, is bringing in at least R2 000,00 an hour! The hidden costs of a holiday are sometimes quite excessive and when you start adding together all these amounts, they really do eventually total up to quite an expense.