economy

There's a quiet revolution going on in the quest for green energy.  You won't see much of this as headline news, but check this out:

Let's make one thing clear before I start on my tirade. I love the United States of America. The country embraced me, gave me an education second to none, and the wonderful friendships I made then endure to this day.

If I start going through a list of influential people I can think of that became great because the US gave them a base, I lose track. Ayn Rand, Bob Marley, Stokely Carmichael, Chinua Achebe, Joni Mitchell, Audrey Hepburn, Neil Young, John Lennon, Carlos Santana, Albert Einstein… The US is the only place that could have given us the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

It's been a while since I made use of any ride hailing service — late 2019 to be exact. That changed in December 2021 when I dropped my mother's car off for a valet service and needed a lift back home. This time around, I used Bolt.

It turned out that my Bolt driver also drives for Uber and for Didi (the newest entry into the Gauteng market). He has three phones — one for each service — and picks up rides on whichever app pops up in turn.

He's very happy with this setup even though the various companies pay different rates at different times.

1. It's the second most expensive spice in the world, hitting a high of $600 per kilogram in 2018 and currently trading at around $567/kg.

In Italy, cigarettes and other tobacco products in that country can only be sold by designated tobacco shops called "tabacchi".

These outlets are ubiquitous and easily recognisable by very distinct blue sign with a large 'T' and the words 'sali tabacchi, valori bollati'.

The "sali" part goes back to days when salt was a government controlled monopoly. That's no longer the case for salt, but tobacco still is.

Many people have noticed that the Ramaphosa government has quite efficiently been rolling out water supplies to communities following the declaration of the Covid-19 State of Disaster.

Not only water supplies; provisions for emergency housing in the form of tents or other makeshift shelters as well as increased shelters for potential victims of domestic violence has also swiftly been deployed.

So many of us have been asking, if government was capable of doing this all along, why was this not done earlier?

Italy, country of my eldest daughter's birth and home to some of my dearest friends, has borne the brunt of Covid-19 tragedies thus far.

As I write this, 812 people have died in the past 24 hours pushing the death toll to 11 591.

There will be much speculation in the years ahead as to why the virus's impact has been so devastating in that country, but put that aside for now.

As pictures roll in from around the country of our urban masses crammed into peri-urban slums (which we sanctimoniously refer to as informal settlements), many of us have taken to sharing sentiments about how privileged we are to be relatively safe within our middle-class and upper-class dwellings.

Privileged? No. At best, we are lucky.