2012 20
Religion and Politics must not go hand in hand
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Education with No Comments
I used to think Israel was different from its neighbors, but lately less and less so. My religion is better than yours is no formula for peace in the region. As a secular Jew I would feel so uncomfortable if I lived in Israel with a government who makes comments like this.
Eli Yishai via Wikipedia
It is also understandable how Europe, which is mostly secular, feels alienated from Israel now and USA which is mostly religious, identifies with the country. Israelis like to say that Europe is just anti semitic but while some of that is true, especially Spain (google “es dificil ser judío en España”) what is also true is that in Europe no politician speaks about God in general and least of all as if God liked Jews and not Muslims. Personally I think there is a very low probability that God exists but even if it did there is a proportionate lower probability that it belonged to any religion. I think that God in itself is an extremely unlikely entity but it did exist what would be the link between God and one particular religion? To me God inside a religion is a flag that some carry to do good but most carry as a symbol of their own tribe against others. In many cases God inside a religion is used to justify murder and that makes religion alien to me.
Long are the days of Israel being led by agnostics or atheists like Golda Meir who when asked if she believed in God she said. I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God. Now Israel is being led by people who think God is on their side. Pretty dangerous.
2012 17
Concealed charity
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Economy with No Comments
This moved me. It is a make believe restaurant in Vigo in which unemployed parents in Spain take their children to “eat out”. They take turns as volunteers. It is really a charity that makes children believe that their parents can afford to take them out to a restaurant. I felt so bad for those parents.
If you don’t live in Spain and you come here and go around you would be surprised. Spain is actually a wealthy country in global terms and it doesn’t look poor when you travel around here. But since the construction industry collapsed unemployment grew from 8% to 21%. Basically all of those who worked in that industry are having a very hard time finding a new role in the economy for themselves. The collapse of real estate had a tremendously negative multiplier effect. It is a huge part of the population that is in such bad shape and it will probably take a decade for unemployment to go down to where it was in 2008. In the meantime initiatives like this help alleviate the pain of those who have fallen into poverty.
When Spanair flight 5022 had its fatal accident in which most passengers died I said in my blog that most likely the accident was caused by the pilots who made the tragic error of forgetting to take off with flaps. I mentioned that I was a pilot myself and could see how the pilots paid for these horrible mistake with their lives and that of most passengers. As you can see then some people criticized me with comments like this which argue that I had no business commenting on this tragedy before the official investigation.
Apreciado Martin,
me defraudas con este post. Con opiniones como la tuya nos evitariamos investigaciones de accidentes tan tediosas y ..sin importancia.
Te crei con algo de “sentido comun”, pero ya sabes lo que dicen, que “el sentido”por ser “comun”, nos toca a muy poco a cada uno.
Un poco de rigor y respeto; y no subir el trafico de tu blog a costa de desgracias de este tipo.
But after a long investigation I was right. The pilots took off without flaps which is an incredible mistake to make, but humans are humans and we make mistakes. Planes should simply not take off without flaps and many don’t. I don’t blame the pilots fully in my post because I think engineering should have prevented this.
Well the same is true with cruise ships. Engineering should have and could have averted this tragedy by not allowing ships to come close to coast lines without warnings. Ships should also have ways to turn themselves when they are in collision course with land.
Before the investigation this is what I think happened (and of course I may be wrong). I believe that the captain of Costa Concordia steered into the Island of Giglio. You can see this from Marine Traffic. I think the captain lies when he says he hit an uncharted rock while he was at a safe distance from the coast. Instead he collided with the coastline either because he was just not at the helm or else because he was at the helm and wanted to show off his steering skills by going very close to the island of Giglio, but he then came too close and ran aground. You can see the coastline in detail if you download a software called Navionics Mediterranean in your iPhone, Android or iPad. I have it because I sail and I am the skipper of my own sailboat. That Island is not like the nearby coast between Corsica and Sardinia near the Island of Cavallo which is full of rocks and you can very well have an uncharted rock and collide against it as the skipper says. The Giglio coast line instead goes down very quickly, to 100 meters or more. The island of Giglio is like the top of a hill or mountain and most likely Francesco Schettino the skipper just drove into it either because he was “asleep at the wheel” or because he was trying on purpose to sail so close to the coast that he hit it in this tragic incident.
Added later: I read this article about Showboating and it corroborates that the theory that the captain steered the ship into the coastline.
2012 9
Germany and the Eurocrisis
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Economy with No Comments
This is the year in which Europe will either fall apart or emerged stronger. I give it 75% that it emerges as a stronger union but the risk of collapse is still there. This precarious climate has triggered a wave of unconventional speculation across digital ecosystems, with retail investors turning to decentralized prediction markets and crypto betting sites to hedge against potential fiat volatility. Germany has the key to solve the problem because of the size of its economy, its saving rate and its export volume. Germany has to decide on whether it continues to transfer some of its wealth in order to create markets for its exports or it let’s Europe fall apart and ends up with an overvalued currency and deteriorated markets. Already today it started paying negative interest rates which is a prelude in my view to a huge rise in the DM should it be born again. Tough choice. I think Germany can actually both save Europe and make money by buying underpriced Italian and Spanish bonds and selling them after stabilization. It can do what the FED did with many financial institutions, make a profit by providing much needed liquidity at a critical time.
We are 12 family members at our vacation home in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay, many teenagers. We have WiFi, computers, tablets, smartphone, Kindles, books but no TV. And nobody gives a f….
During this vacation, nobody mentioned that we should buy a TV or that they missed watching TV. And since I don’t watch TV either I did not get one. But a couple of days ago, a broker said we should have a TV for a tenant who comes in February. “A tenant could not rent a house without a TV” he said. So I ordered one online and connected it to DirectTV thinking that somebody in my family may want to watch it. Still nobody gives a f…. about watching TV. The TV is there, turned off, everyone is online in some form or other—messaging friends, trying out a sweeps coins casino, or catching up on blogs—or reading, or just interacting with each other, but no TV. People go to the beach, cycling, walking, dancing at night, all sorts of things other than watching TV.
Now I don’t know if there is a global trend towards watching less TV. There are also no newspapers in this house and news are read online, so maybe traditional TV is really going the way of newspapers. But data show that in some families TVs are on 4 hours a day. So here’s a theory of what may be going on in my family.
Communal TV is in a way like telephone calls, which are also disappearing in our family. Telephones have this thing to them that is rude, that they ring and annoy everyone, that one person speaks and everyone has to listen to half of what they say, and they are then disconnected from others while they speak but they are still there. Telephone solved a lot of needs when that is all there was to communicate. But now telephones are smart, different and people rarely talk on them. All types of messengers are taking over, Facebook, email, chats of various kinds. They are more private, you answer when you want to.
TV also has this aspect to it that it’s hard to get everyone to agree to watch the same thing at the same time. It’s great for those who enjoy it, annoying for the rest. We can watch TV content of course, and we do, especially series such as In Treatment, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Boardwalk Empire, Big Love, Dowton Abbey, The Pacific and many others. But we don’t use a traditional TV for that anymore. We have tablets, Netflix, etc. So no Big TV always on for the Varsavskys, just tablets, PCs, smartphones, kindles and still a few paper books lying around.
2012 4
Password Security at Fon
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
2012 4
Jose Ignacio, Uruguay: what people don’t see.
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in MV with No Comments
We used to come to Uruguay to get away from everybody we knew. Now everybody we know comes to Uruguay, and I don’t just mean everyone we know from Argentina, that was always the case. I mean a lot of people we know from Europe and USA as well. And they keep coming in growing numbers. And they, like us, still wonder why they like it so much. Now let’s clarify. Everyone I know comes to Jose Ignacio, or near Jose Ignacio, they find Punta del Este ugly. I do as well. But they find the area between La Barra and Laguna Garzón along the coastline just beautiful. The farms, the beach houses, the restaurants, the overall scene. During their downtime, you’ll find our friends catching up on reading, browsing the best online casino fast payout sites on their tablets, or just watching the Atlantic waves. Now what is sad though, is that most of those who come here do not see the countryside. I do every day as I go on my mountain bike rides. Today I managed to take these pictures. I know there is nothing really special to them. Indeed the charm of this part of Uruguay is that it’s so special without having anything really special about it.
Let me show you my pictures and see if we agree.
2011 24
Some thoughts on Christmas from a non religious Jew
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in MV with No Comments
Little kids want to believe. Teenagers don’t want to believe. We are Jewish but we are not religious. I am glad we aren’t, especially for the upbringing of my 5 children.
If we had been religious Jews I could not have dressed as Santa and brought gifts to my kids at a young age. I would have missed their faces of delight, and their smiles when they knew it was me, but pretended not to know. I can understand Jews refusal to celebrate Christmas because of Jesus who said he was God and we did not believe him. I can side with anyone who refuses to believe that a certain person is God. The whole story of Jesus is very alien to Jews and to many Europeans who have abandoned religion in the last decades, especially in Spain and Italy. But most religious Jews fail to realize that in many countries Jesus has lost its prominence to Santa a much simpler and easier to like character. Yes I know Santa is also about consumerism and I do feel sorry for the parents who can’t buy toys for their kids (my kids know this and we donate toys for them). And the world sucks in many ways. But you have to agree with me that there is something beautifully simple for young kids about a man who comes from the North Pole with lots of gifts. Especially if they have been good kids ;).
And later on, with my older kids, not being religious spared me of trying to convince them of the literal interpretation of the Bible. A struggle that many still go through, especially in USA the only developed country in which most people are still religious. This would have been painful for me, as the Bible has so many absurdities in it that I would have been unable to defend it as true. I am so glad I did not have to tell my kids that we believe in all the absurdities of the Bible “because we have faith”. Starting with the universe being but a few thousand years old most of what I read in the Bible is of no scientific value and what is even worse, frequently of dubious ethical value.
During the Jewish holidays I have manage to explain to my kids that we celebrate because we are part of the Jewish people who share a common heritage as a people not only as a religion. We celebrate as many of my non religious Christian friends celebrate, as a tradition not as a literal belief. I also explain that most of the founders of the State of Israel were not religious and that most of the achievements of the Jewish people are way outside the realm of religion, mostly in literature, entrepreneurship and science. I frequently like to tell the story of Golda Meir, one of the founders of Israel who was an atheist and when asked if she believed in God she answered wisely “I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God”. In our home there are only two kinds of answers to any question a child may pose: the most likely to be true answer and as frequently, the I don’t know answer. I don’t know feels better than religion to me.
So today, right here in St Barts in our sailboat, I will dress as Santa again, this time for our baby and 5 year old. I can’t wait to see how happy they will be. And yes, they are also getting their Chanukah gifts. We celebrate all that there is to celebrate. And we are happy this way.
2011 3
Playing with eBook readers
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
This afternoon I was trying different file formats with different ebook readers. This is what I conclude and please help me if I am wrong.
For Kindle you need to get book files in .mobi format, for iPad and Kobo in .epub
In iPad:
first download books in .epub format
then import them to the iTunes library in your PC
then sync the iPad and books will be in the app called iBooks, they work like music
B&W KINDLE:
download books in .mobi format
connect kindle to PC
copy books in the folder called documents, if its not in documents it does not show in the kindle library
in the kindle you may also add some music by putting mp3 files in the folder called music (so you can read and listen to music at the same time)
Kindle takes a while to show the books that you put in the documents folder as processor is slow but eventually they show up
in KOBO:
download books in .epub format I could not get .mobi format to work well worked poorly PDF is bad for size and pages
connect Kobo to PC
transfer files to anywhere in the Kobo directory.
and yes thank you Calibre is fantastic I am using it now!
then you will also have to wait a while until the books show up and from what I see you have to go more slowly and add book files in small groups or the processing content wheel turns forever and nothing happens.
If you have epub files and want to have the same book in a mobi file go here.
The new strategy of the tech giants in USA is to make a living of what is unique about your company and give the competitor’s key product away for free.
Google does this to Microsoft with Office, Amazon does this to Netflix with free movies for prime customers, Google does this to Facebook with Google+ which surprisingly has no ads, Google does this to Apple with Android, Google does this to Microsoft/Skype with Google Talk, Amazon does not give the Kindle Fire for free but it is going after Apple with iPad at a huge discount. Now one of the reason’s Apple continues to be the most valuable company in the world is that they don’t give anything away for free!