I was quite interested to read about the latest in 3D printing.  A German company by the name of Doob has created 3D scanning booths in two cities in America as well as Europe and Japan.  Apparently, you enter a small booth, which has 54 cameras, photographing you from all sides, and they use these photos to print a small 3D model of you which takes two weeks to be made and they also give you a digital file of it in case you want to put it into any video game as an Avatar.  Apparently, they are doing a lot of couples, for the top of wedding cakes, like this and you can have a statue of yourself for $295.  It sounds quite exciting, but at that price I don’t see them bringing a booth to South Africa any time soon.

The way that load shedding is communicated is really not acceptable. You get told that you have to go to the website, then you have to choose your Province, your city and then you get all sorts of divisions by suburbs, etc and have to go through Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3.  I really cannot see why, in this day and age, that one cannot register one’s work and home address with your mobile number and your e-mail address.  Then, when either your place of work or your home address is going to be without electricity, either that day or the next day, an alert would be sent.  It is so much easier to deal with the shortage if, for example, you know that you will not have electricity from 6pm to 10pm rather than to suddenly have it happen to you.  It is way too much effort to have to go to all the various charts and stages and at a minimal cost, even if you only receive 30 minutes notice, you could be notified by e-mail and SMS simply by registering with the relevant authority who is implementing the Eskom load shedding and I do hope they think about that.

Today is the day of the budget speech and our Finance Minister, Nhlanhla Mene, will deliver his first proper budget speech.  It is one that many people will await with anticipation, particularly anybody doing Road Accident Fund work because we are hoping that there will be a lump sum that is allocated to the Road Accident Fund in this year’s budget, not to mention an increase on the petrol levy to the Road Accident Fund.  The Road Accident Fund has a cash shortage at the moment as a result of settling way more than the normal number of cases last year – a 110,000 compared to 53,000 to 55,000 a year previously and is now short of cash.  Others will be watching it to see whether or not there is an increase in personal income tax or any tax and at the rich.  One certainly hopes that the sin taxes – on alcohol and cigarettes will be increased substantially, and not just by the normal 50c a year.

The recent approach of our government to foreigners has been quite surprising.  The Minister for Small Business Development, Lindile Zulu, has for example explained that foreigners are here as a “courtesy” and they went on to say that the foreign shop owners, who experienced so much looting, need to share their business secrets with local people.  They may just be Spaza owners, but it sends a tremendously poor signal to any overseas companies that when you want to come into South Africa and open a business, you need to expose all your business secrets to your competitors!  Her comments are also totally inappropriate – in a time when we have looters running around and xenophobia cropping up all the time, her comments seem to imply that foreigners need to be more respectful in South Africa and need to proceed very cautiously with their business.  They are clearly not allowed to try and compete and make a living and let’s be honest, they would not be here if their situation back at home was not very poor.  It is even more sad, as many have noted, because when the ANC was in exile it was the various African countries that actually hosted them, and now we have a government Minister essentially telling people from those countries that they are not particularly excited to have them here.  One then only has to look further at the government policy that we have heard about limiting farm sizes and foreign ownership of land to get a distinctly anti-foreigners approach in South Africa.

On 12 July 2014, my uncle, Chris de Broglio, died.  I only met him once in my life, in Cape Town, and I cannot seem to find the photograph of that meeting now.  Ironically I was in Cape Town to make a representation, on behalf of the Johannesburg Attorneys Association, to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on justice. They wanted to move the Randburg and Sandton Magistrates’ Court to fall under the jurisdiction of Pretoria unbelievably, and I was there to make a submission as to why that would not be a good idea.  

My uncle was a weightlifting champion in South Africa for many years and got into trouble because he started training black weightlifters, something that was not appreciated.  Eventually, he campaigned successfully via SANROC for the expulsion of South Africa from international football as well as the Olympic Games and that international sports isolation obviously had its role to play in ultimately ending apartheid.  He was awarded the Olympic Order for his work against racism and when I asked him if he had written anything about his involvement, he sent me the document that I have loaded here (http://onlinelaw.co.za/docs/The_SANROC_story.pdf), which will allow anybody who is interested in the story to read a lot more, including why he left South Africa after being harassed by the security police and the considerable efforts involved in having South Africa banned from the Olympic Games.

I was stunned to read that the DA considers one of the problems in South Africa to be the sexist salaries paid to women sports team members.  They apparently laid a complaint with the Commission for Gender Equality after discovering that female cricketers in South Africa get a maximum of R10 000,00 a game – which is more than I thought they would be getting, but male cricketers in South Africa get approximately R46 000,00 per test and more if they win the test.  I have written about this before, and for me it all gets down to who the audience is and if it does not get down to who the audience is, then I ask those who have a contrary opinion as to who will be paying for it?  In other words, if a women’s cricket test match in South Africa has 1000 spectators and does not earn much from television coverage, if indeed there is demand from the TV audience (which of course is both male and female), where exactly is the money going to come from to give this type of increase?  

When I wrote about this before some lady wrote on my blog that you needed more money to be put into the sport before you would get results, and that is true of course, but it is  also true of every business and every sport – if we pumped millions into chess, we would have a lot more people playing chess.  If we put chess on television all day and all night, we have a lot more people playing chess – but is that how a business or sport works?  Is it going to be held up by artificial rules, forcing people to be exposed to something that does not interest them and making sure that all people are paid equal amounts – this is beginning to sound a bit like socialism – for competing in the same sports, irrespective of how talented they may be, or how much commercial success they may have in terms of attracting crowds or people?  

To me, I believe that the market should dictate and I would ask those ladies in particular, who are going to reply on this blog, to tell me honestly if they have ever gone along to a stadium to support South Africa’s female cricket team or if they have ever watched it on TV or have any desire to watch it.  Even if sexism was the problem, If every woman in South Africa supported the female cricket team, then regardless of whether or not there is any male interest in it, it would be a huge commercial success.  Advertisers would fight for advertising space during their games, TV stations would have bidding wars as to who would have the right to flight their games and there would be no problem with raising money for the sport.  It seems to me that sometimes politicians really waste our money – after all, if the Gender Commission decides to take this issue up, we as the taxpaying public will be paying for an investigation into the male cricket team compared to the female cricket team as well as Bafana Bafana compared to Banyana Banyana, hearings, commissioners and report backs.  

It is actually the kind of topic politicians love, because instead of talking about issues like Nkandla, you can divert public attention with absolute nonsense.  I am all for anyone who thinks it is a good idea signing themselves up for a special tax.  To me it is like Samsung asking for money on the basis that both they and Apple make similar types of Smartphones, but that Apple earns much higher profits, which they do.  Is that not unfair to Samsung?  Shouldn’t we investigate why Samsung cannot make as much as Apple? What about people who play action cricket?  Shouldn’t they also be promoted on TV, and paid huge amounts to play action cricket even if there is not that much spectator interest in it?  For those who do putt-putt, perhaps claiming that the basics come from the game of golf and why should golfers earn more than the world putt-putt champion?  

The second you leave business and economic principles, you get into a world of government subsidies and taxpayers having to pay for the equality of others and that may make sense in a political sphere or in human rights, but it surely cannot when it comes to people’s leisure time?  

I am delighted to hear that a coroner in London is apparently considering reopening the inquest into Anni Dewani’s death.  Obviously, the criminal trial in South Africa has been dealt with but the UK authorities are fully entitled to hold an inquest and if they do decide to hold such inquest, there is a good chance that Dewani will have to answer certain questions under oath.  He obviously avoided that in his trial in South Africa so it will be very interesting to see what happens next in this story.  Most South Africans have, I believe, very strong opinions about the man and the case which featured a very poor prosecution and even worse witnesses.  On the other hand one is allowed in such hearings to avoid any answer that may incriminate you – but on his version he did nothing wrong so hopefully his lawyers won’t be taking that stance at all.

I was terribly disappointed by what we saw at the State of the Nation Address, or like everything these days with an acronym, SONA for short.  Firstly, the ANC clearly had a plan to muzzle reporters and the public in the event that things got out of hand in the chamber.  They introduced devices that jam cell phone signals to stop people communicating with those outside Parliament.  Luckily, the parliamentarians were having none of that, and basically insisted that the speech could not proceed until the jamming devices were switched off. That was then attended to.  The EFF made the predictable fuss that one was expecting, and whether one agrees with them or not, because it was not the appropriate time to interrupt proceedings, there is no doubt that much of the nation is frustrated by Jacob Zuma’s continued ignorance of the Nkandla deal and trying to pretend that he did not want any of the upgrades while his own architect supervised them.  

There is no doubt that the Speaker of Parliament, Baleka Mbete, dealt with proceedings in a very high-handed and poor fashion.  She appeared to be reading from a script at times and was quite prepared to just escalate the situation as quickly as she could without actually reacting to what was actually going on in front of her.  The parliamentarians are entitled to ask questions and raise points of order, and she simply fobbed them off before they began speaking and essentially told them she knew what they were going to say, which she probably did, and had them tossed out.  That is not how democracy works.  It is certainly not democratic either to march in police carrying guns to remove people from Parliament and everybody will have to sit back and decide if this is the way that we want to proceed in South Africa.  The most scary part of course is that this is all about the ANC protecting Jacob Zuma and essentially where one man tearing the country apart at the moment.   Let’s be honest, it is not just about Nkandla, there is a background too of the bribes and the corruption charges, etc.

We’ve come across a lot of copycats in the past who, as a result of our media coverage, have tried to piggy back on our advertising.  As a result, and because Google is not interested in arguments about who owns what websites in South Africa, they will not act unless you own the trademark, we had to trademark our websites and logo’s.  I have written about some of our trademarks before, but the latest trademarks that we have been awarded are for the two hands that appear on our letterhead, our website www.personalinjury.co.za, for our firm’s main website at www.onlinelaw.co.za (we already have a trademark for the website www.accidentclaim.co.za).  We have also been awarded a trademark, which prevents anybody else in South Africa, using the phrase “If it is not your fault, it shouldn’t be your problem” in the context of a legal service and the surname “de Broglio” is now trademarked by me in the context of legal firms.  I guess it is the nature of the legal business that we always make money out of either people’s misfortune or dishonesty, but trademarks are a clear example of where one takes action basically to prevent dishonesty, because if everybody was honest and carried on reputably in business, you would never have to trademark something, because they would not copy your ideas or websites. 

I have written about drones before, and there are undoubtedly privacy and security concerns.   I did not realise however how sophisticated drones had already become, because it is one thing to read about it and it is another thing to watch a drone rise 200 metres above your head, and then fly half a kilometre in 10 or 15 seconds, before returning to you.  The drones I have played with were far inferior to one that a friend recently showed me.  He bought it in America, and it is one of the R50 000,00 type drones, so it is relatively simple compared to what the American military will have, but extremely fast, high-powered and with a range of 2 km.  It is quite noisy as well, and when it is flying around a house and a golf course, it can take HD pictures in 4k quality – allowing you to really see things that your neighbours might not want you to see for example.  

I think we are going to see legislation about these quite soon, and I just cannot see that companies will be able to use them to fly goods to you as Amazon once suggested.  It may be possible in more rural areas, but with planes taking off at a nearby airport, and drones flying at heights that aeroplanes and helicopters can fly at, one can see potential for disaster.  The commercial uses are certainly going to include, as they already do, real estate and I have seen quite a few wedding videos and photographs notably showing the chapel, etc and the guests from the sky, which are also quite dramatic.  Height can give you a completely different perspective on a property that you may know well, and golf courses are also beginning to use this to promote themselves. Any property or estate that has a lot of natural greenery will generally look spectacular from the sky and there is no doubt that it is going to be used much more in all sports events, from overhead shots in horseracing to stadium shots in any sport where you can now go closer than you would in a helicopter.

Every now and then I receive an e-mail from people asking whether we do Workmen’s compensation claims and whether we can assist them with their problem.  I have a standard answer that I send at the time which is essentially that we cannot take their case and we would refer them to the Law Society.  I don’t know any particular attorneys who deal with such mattes, and I would think that they are few and far between, given that the Compensation Commissioner does not pay legal costs.  In other words, any fee that the attorney takes will have to be paid by the person seeking his or her help or out of the compensation.  The compensation is so paltry it is embarrassing.  

I was listening to a show on Radio 702, featuring an attorney who deals with many of the mining cases, Richard Spoor, and some of what he spoke about was quite frightening.  Firstly, he described their system that we all know as being broken, but made it sound even worse than I imagined it was.  The compensation one receives for losing an eye for example appears to be limited to R50 000,00 and that is about the same that miners who can never work again, get.  That is absolutely ridiculous.  I was reminded that all companies pay the same rate for Workmen’s compensation and that in itself is where a part of the problem lies.  

There is no punishment for an industry that has more injuries, there is no punishment in the form of higher levies or contributions for an employer whose employees get injured more often – we all pay the same amount.  That means people who are sitting in a safe office environment, around desks where of course there is always a chance still for a tripping incident, have their employers paying as much to the Workmen’s compensation as a mining company would, for their workers getting exposed to far higher risks every single day.  It was sad to hear further that at least 30% of gold miners will at some or other stage develop a chest infection related to the amount of dust they have to breathe in every day.  It surely makes sense that those employers should pay more so as to at least incentivise them to try and improve the conditions?  At the same time, the benefits are absolutely pathetic and one can understand the fears that people have for a similar scheme being introduced for the Road Accident Fund – the Road Accident Fund Benefit Scheme or RABS, is based on Workmen’s compensation to a large extent.

I have written previously about e-mails that I send, from time to time, about robots that are out of order, bad signage on the way to Lanseria Airport, or indeed grass that needs cutting.  Johannesburg calls itself a world class African city and at long last we actually have an application called the JRA Find & Fix, which you can download for your Smartphone and which allows you to report stormwater, grass that needs to be cut, potholes, traffic signals, traffic signage, manhole covers and even guardrails.  

It tracks your location, allows you to put in a description of the problem and takes a photograph of it as well.  I certainly think anybody who consider themselves a responsible citizen of Johannesburg needs to give the JRA the benefit of the doubt, and load up the application to their phone and use it to report problems from time to time.  I have loaded but not had a chance to use the application as yet, but I noted that it had a rating on Google, although I loaded it off the Apple Store of 3.1 out of 5, which is not too impressive and some of the complaints on the website have been met with responses that if nothing has been done about something that it should be e-mailed to find&[email protected] with a note – so that is another e-mail to use to get things fixed.  You must take a photo at the time and cannot use it for a photo that you already have.  

At the end of the day, if you don’t report something out of order, and always assume that somebody else has, you cannot complain.  I find that my complaints, although some of them are not acted on, but quite a few of them are, and invariably the relatively quick action, regard being having to when I complained, would tend to suggest that nobody else had complained about the problem before me.  That type of giving up before you have even started attitude, and just complaining to friends as opposed to somebody who can actually fix things, does not help to improve one’s surroundings.

I enjoyed reading a book, published in 2011, by Allan Roth, titled “How a second grader beats Wall Street”.  Basically the books sets out the principles the author says make good investment and it is not so much about his second grader son beating Wall Street, but the lessons that he has taught his second grader son, and his advice on how to invest one’s money.  

The real key principle is that very few investment management firms ever beat the Index and you pay them fees of approximately 1,5% or 2% a year to not beat the Index when you could get an Index ETF at a cost of probably 0,2%.  The cost difference does not sound like much, but when you take it over the months, the years and the decades, the extra 1,5% you are paying ends up costing you a lot.  It reminds me of any time I flick across the local financial shows, and I don’t really watch them, ranging from Business Day TV to Summit TV and the local CNBC and how the tips for shares are always been promoted by some late 20’s young stockbroker in a suit.  It is seldom somebody who has been through two or three market crashes and is 45 and that is probably because most of those people have made so many predictions that have gone wrong, that the companies need to put fresh faces on TV.  When you think about it though, you cannot make decisions based on somebody, probably no more than two or three years out of University, just giving their opinion and while I understand that they are generally highly paid, it seems to be a career that only lasts a few years for the vast majority of them.  

The bottom line though is according to the author of the book is that in most cases they are being highly paid for nothing – by taking a low cost Index fund of the whole market you would normally achieve better returns for yourself than you would by listening to all of the talking heads representing all the competing firms who are all quite happy to not match the Index, and charge you handsome fees for doing so.

It is one thing having to accept and deal with the electricity issues that we have in South Africa.  It is another thing not understanding why various arms of government and the municipality cannot co-ordinate.  My drive home recently took me 101 minutes and by the time I got home I heard people calling in on the radio and saying what a wonderful job the Outsurance people had done.  The Outsurance people were certainly not around when I went through Sandton and they did not help me at all, and I cannot understand why it should be the job of a private initiative to try and resolve the traffic issues when there is load shedding.  

If load shedding is as clinical as Eskom in the various departments claim it is, and everybody knows that a certain area is going to be cut off at 2pm, then why can’t the traffic police in those areas, who you will never see when there are terrible traffic delays, be co-ordinated to go to all the major intersections in that area at that time?  In other words, if they are going to cut off the traffic to the heart of Sandton and the surrounding suburbs, which isn’t a great idea in the first place, considering our Stock Exchange and the major businesses in the country are based here, can’t they at least co-ordinate with the Metro Police and traffic officers as well as the JRA?  How much effort would it take to send two traffic officers to each of the major intersections where the gridlock is likely to happen, and have them there before the traffic issues begin?  Time is money and they are wasting an awful amount of productive time of the people of this country sitting in traffic, while the very people who are responsible for the traffic are never anywhere to be seen when the robots are all out due to load shedding!

The heading is not an error.  It should, one would hope, read “government tackles corruption”, but at the moment in South Africa it appears that the government is tackling corruption fighters.  The latest drama obviously relates to the Hawks and the various court cases and hearings involving Anwa Dramat.  It is surprising to read that he is being prosecuted now for alleged actions of illegally returning certain Zimbabweans to Zimbabwe some years ago, even when an internal police report has already cleared him of that.  It is hard not to suspect that it has something to do with the fact that he made the mistake of calling for the Nkandla files and I think everybody in those departments needs to understand that calling for these files is not a good idea!  

It is never a bad idea to do your job properly, but it seems that there are certain tasks that if you look into them, or even call for the files, it can end your career in any crime-fighting force fairly quickly in South Africa.  Interestingly enough, the Minister said that this is all about race – and if the people who were returned to Zimbabwe had been white, that the headlines would have been about human rights, but because they were black Zimbabweans, the media was focusing on Dramat’s suspension as opposed to the illegal rendition of the Zimbabweans.  He went on to say, and bear in mind that a court has already found his suspension of Dramat to be illegal, “This is a sad reality we must fight and defeat, for our immediate aim as a country remains this creation in practice, of a truly just and democratic society, that is able to sweep away the old legacy of colonial conquests and white domination.”  Somewhat surprisingly, this is the same government that fought very hard not to let us have the report on the Zimbabwean elections.  At the same time the head of the Special Investigating Unit, Advocate Soni, who previously conducted an investigation into President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla home, resigned to spend time with his ill wife.  He said that working in the job “has been stressful and it is a serious challenge …” but that his resignation had nothing to do with things happening in other state departments.  In the meantime, President Zuma is attempting to suspend the head of the NPA, Mxolisi Nxasana, and the head of Anti-Corruption and Security at SARS, Clifford Collings, was demoted and the agency’s Chief Operation Officer resigned.  It seems like crime fighting agencies are missing a lot of the leadership right now and that’s certainly not good for the country, but it may be assisting some individuals.

My IT company insisted a year ago that I must upgrade to fibre, telling me that the Internet connection would be far superior to the ADSL, which we then had and which was running at about 5 or 6Mbs.  I did the move, which was obviously more expensive, and MWeb supplied the service to us on Neotel lines.  They have recently been bought out by Internet Solutions.  

I have a 5Mbs internet line with MWeb and there is the first problem – because they have been advertising a 10Mbs line for the same price that they charge me for the 5Mbs line – but did they upgrade me to it, when after all I was paying enough for the 10Mbs line?  No.  That is a poor show in the first place. Worse, our 5Mbs line has been running at 1Mbs and for a week after reporting it, despite attending at their offices, meeting with them, making phone calls, e-mailing them, etc – all that happens is we get told, what they obviously think is a magic word – called “escalate” as in our problem will be escalated to the next level and they will escalate the issue to the next level of staff. We never get to hear from the “next level” of staff, or the people that my problem is escalated to, and yet the problem continues.  The most irritating part of it is of course I was told by the IT company that once you are on fibre, you don’t have any of the inconsistencies and problems that can be associated with ADSL!   Well, my fibre works like a snail and MWeb so far has been the champions of escalation, but I don’t want my problem escalated, I want my problem fixed.

I have written recently about inflation, and while we try to get inflation down, when prices actually start dropping and getting cheaper each year, it is very bad for the economy.  That is called deflation and Japan has suffered with that for a very long time and it is one of the current words we hear quite often because European economies, as well as America, are terrified of deflation.  

The problem with deflation is that when things get cheaper every month or every six months, people stop buying – why buy now if you can buy it cheaper later?  As they stop buying companies are starting to make less profit and as companies make less profit their employees either get retrenched or no longer get raises because they are in a deflationary environment.  That in turn causes them to spend even less which has a spiralling effect on what is a consumer economy.  The ways governments have typically tackled this is by lowering interest rates but with European and American interest rates close to zero, and Switzerland even at -0,75%, they don’t have many options right now.  That is why around the world they’ve had what they call quantitative easing, when governments have printed more money and tried to get it out there. That is meant to lead to inflation, but for some reason it has not so far and it may be because it does not seem to end up in the hands of the man in the street but is really traded between central banks and finance companies.  The experts don’t seem to have clear answers on whatever works with deflation, but we do know that this is a risk that many countries face at the moment and it means you should never be upset about a slight bit of inflation in your country – because it is good for the economy, it is good for raises and generally it keeps everyone buying and spending.

I spent some time thinking recently about how we take so many things for granted.  What actually led to this was hearing about two ladies fighting about what tasks they have and who should do what when I am aware that that particular business is going to be closing down shortly and neither of them will have any work at all.  The human capacity to moan, complain and to find things to fight about is incredible.  One should sometimes think about what it is that is upsetting one and gauge whether or not that is a sign of a pretty good life!  

If your issue in life is about what tasks are yours and what tasks are somebody else’s, I would suggest that life is going pretty well for you.  There are so many far more serious things that one could be worrying about or upset about and so maybe it is a very good sign of you life if that is the type of nonsense you are worrying about.  When you have true worries and when you are really in trouble, you will not be thinking about what is or is not your task at work.  

It is amazing how many new studies come out every week on the human body, the environment and a variety of interesting topics.  The latest one on diet comes from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego.  The report, based on tests done on mice, indicates that when you eat, or at least when mice eat, is critical to their weight.  In other words, even if the mice all eat the same diet, those who eat at the wrong times will ultimately be more obese than those eating the same diet at the right times.  

The question then is when is the right time?  The scientists don’t have an exact answer for what time you should eat, but the tests on the mice indicated that those who limited their eating to 12 hours of the day, despite eating the same food, were less obese than those whose eating was not limited to 12 hours.  They say that that 12 hours would begin with your first cup of tea or coffee when you wake up in the morning and your last meal should be no later than 12 hours after that first cup of tea or coffee in the morning. If you snack at late hours of the night, you are going to put on more weight, even if you are eating relatively healthily.  The scientists believe that the time at which food is eaten influences the body’s internal clock and in a stronger way than dark and light cycles.  That in turn affects your metabolism.

We are going to be hearing a lot more about the budget in the budget speech shortly.  I certainly do hope, amongst other things, there will be the usual annual increase to the Road Accident Fund in terms of 10c or 15c per litre, but more particularly a lump sum.  Lump sums have been given to the Road Accident Fund in the past, and with the way they are doing their very best to settle as many cases as quickly as possible, they have reduced their cash flow to the extent that a cash injection is now needed.  

I do hope that the Finance Minister is looking at this and that that grant will be given.  The RAF is one of the few taxes where the people get what they pay for in terms of input relative to output.  I cannot help but notice the uncanny coincidence that financial problems of the RAF only started after the Law Society of the Northern Provinces, whose RAF committee I chaired at that time, handed in our submission on the new proposed Road Accident Benefit Scheme or RABS as we know it.  In that submission we alleged that the Road Accident Fund had no cash problems, and there was no need for a new system.  Lo and behold, only one or two months later, the Road Accident Fund was settling every single case it could possibly find, appealing to people to try and settle their cases, writing to attorneys asking what matters they needed to be paid and before you knew it, they then said they were short of cash.  That is almost as if they are determined to show that the allegations of them not having financial issues are not true, that they have gone out of their way as quickly as they could to run out all of the money that they did have.