Killing us softly

Cell phones have been around since the 1980s and since their inception there have been numerous claims as to the health risks linked to their usage.

Doomsayers suggest electromagnetic radiation can cause genetic damage, brain dysfunction, brain tumours and other conditions such as sleep disorders and headaches.

I’m starting to believe there is more than a grain truth to these dire predictions. Since I’ve had a cell phone my hair has receded, my hearing has deteriorated, my eyesight has got weaker and my memory is a shadow of its former self.

I was about to sit down and write to the core people at Apple offering to settle out of court for a modest sum in American dollars when it occurred to me they would counter-claim that my original mobiles were probably made by either Nokia or Motorola. As they had only entered the market reasonably recently with the iPhone they could hardly be held accountable. Game, set and match to Apple even before I put pen to paper.

But there are lots of other rudiments bubbling just below the surface that are more injurious to our health than the humble cellular phone. Prominent among these is obesity and its attendant disease - diabetes. Sugar is the enemy element here and corporates to blame are KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Hell’s Pizza and just to make sure we succumb more quickly I understand Domino’s Pizzas are soon to relocate in Chapel Street.

And we’ve known about the dangers of cigarette smoking for a long time. The Smoke Free Environment Act was passed in 1990 and created a bureaucracy of consultants, lobbyists, medical specialists and service providers and there has been an almost total compliance with the legislation. But workers advocate Helen Kelly might have queered the pitch by demanding and getting medicinal cannabis. This will inevitably lead to recreational cannabis being legalised introducing a whole new coterie of smokers.

I gave up smoking when I was thirteen after failing to finish my first cigarette. My Hollywood hero at the time was Audie Murphy, a returned American serviceman and a vocal non-smoker. Had I idolised Humphrey Bogart it might have been a different story, particularly as he nearly wore the skin off his fingers making roll-your-owns at the superbly named Rick’s Bar in Casablanca.

Rolling-your-own is a mandatory feature of joint indulgence.

Alcohol, we’ve been reminded of late, is a major cause of various forms of cancer. As most people enjoy a tipple and given the outcome of 1920s prohibition experiment in America a government sponsored Alcohol Free Environment Act seems unlikely. But the risk still lingers.

And then into this cacophony of deathly prognostications walks Nigel Latta with a sobering TV documentary telling us the current superannuation is not sustainable because we are all living too long.

And so there are deadly diseases all around us and constant warnings of earthquakes, famine, wars and floods and yet we refuse to stop breathing?

Maybe we should just shut down all the pharmacies. A friend of mine was taking so many pills when he died they had to put child-proof lid on his coffin.

“Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do on a Sunday afternoon” - Susan Ertz

Read More...

The country of tomorrow

American satirist H. L. Mencken once famously said: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populous alarmed - and hence clamour to be led to safety - by menacing it with and endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I suspect there are a similar group of Cassandra-like sports journalists eager to do the same.

Before the 2016 Summer Olympics we were bombarded with negative comments telling us why the tournament was a disaster waiting to happen. This is typical pre-games reporting and the perceived wisdom leading up to the Rio extravaganza was that danger lurked everywhere. A Zika epidemic, infested waterways, a political and economic crisis and a soaring crime rate.

Alright, the Aussies found early on that the plumbing in their village was sub-standard, and some prima-donna American swimmers were held up at gunpoint by a bunch of pseudo-policemen waving badges and robbed of everything except their passports, watches and other desirable items on their personages. As far as I know the Ockers were eventually able to flush away their ablutions and of course the swimmers terrifying robbery was a work of dubious fiction.

In the event the games were a triumph and we were all reminded, thanks to the exceptional television coverage, with the colourful venues and theatrical stadium entrances, just how captivated we are every four years.

To be fair, beyond the television spectacle there are weighty issues that Brazil is facing and I too was sceptical about how the politically unstable country was going to handle the potentially damaging exposure.

I spent six weeks in Brazil in 1986 leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team to the northern area called Amazonia. We were billeted with Rotarian families and started our study tour in Belem, an equatorial city at the mouth of the Amazon. We then journeyed into the hinterland staying in smaller towns, ending up at a city called Manaus known at the time as the murder capital of the world.

Poverty in all these areas was endemic and there was no social welfare system for the populous to fall back on. The homeless build crude dwellings, known as favelas, on land that most would find worthless. These hillside shanty towns didn’t feature too much in the gilded Olympic television coverage.

You won’t believe these figures, but back in 1986 inflation was running at 300 per cent and interest rates were 1400 per cent. The government had told the citizens to add three noughts to their currency, known as the cruzeiro, so a ten cruzeiro note became a ten thousand cruzeiro note. This is crude, but I’ll tell you anyway; banknotes were so worthless people used them as toilet paper. Toilet paper was in short supply and expensive.

Cruzeiro’s were withdrawn from circulation in 1994 and replaced with the “real.”

Brazil’s slogan was “The Country of Tomorrow” and one industrialist I met reckoned this was their problem. “Tomorrow never comes,” he said, “And so we are drifting further and further into poverty without anyone needing to redress the situation.”

Well thirty years on, from the comfort of my couch, the images looked pretty appealing.

Perhaps tomorrow has finally arrived.

“Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.” - Richard Nixon

Read More...

The trans-Tasman enigma

I’ve just spent a couple of week in Aussie where things looked prosperous, however I was assured by those in the know that they are in fact on the cusp of a recession. We spent a few days in a town called Ballina in Northern New South Wales where we have friends. Ballina has an almost identical population to Masterton’s and so I was keen to make comparisons. The town has a main street about as extensive as ours, but it also boasts two quite large shopping malls.

I spoke to two shopkeepers, one in the mall and one in the main street. Their rents seemed astronomical. The mall retailer was paying $11,000 a month for what I thought was a relatively small shop; the main street vendor had a shop considerably larger than the mall premise and was paying $63,000 a year. I have some knowledge of rents in Masterton’s retail area and would estimate that Ballina’s lessees are paying about three times more than they would here.

Ballina’s main street had recently been revitalised with expensively-paved footpaths and attractive street lighting and the retailer told me his rates had gone up to pay for the improvements. His new rates however where way below what CBD property owners pay in Masterton.

I’d no sooner got back when our Reserve Bank Governor lowered the cash rate to two per cent; an all-time low. As much as I don’t understand some of the economic discrepancies between Australia and New Zealand the methodology behind the Reserve Bank Governors approach to controlling inflation is even more confusing.

My bookkeeping teachers at Wairarapa College taught us that the definition of inflation was “too much money chasing too few goods.” This was the prevailing wisdom at the time and seemed to make good economic sense. The government of the day managed its balance of payments account carefully and imports were limited, hence too few goods.

Thanks to the Korean War, wool prices were at an all-time high, ergo, too much money.

Fast forward to 2016 and inflation is now running at less than one percent and so we are looking at an entirely different set of circumstances. We now have too little money chasing too many goods, so how does that work?

Our shops are chock full of all manner of merchandise, most of which is imported and much of it nonessential and yet incomes have remained pretty static for some time. The Reserve Bank legislation was originally enacted to lift interest rates to mop up any spare money that was floating around which suggests the definition of inflation hasn’t changed and yet by lowering interest rates savings are discouraged, property is king and house prices and rents are going through the roof.

Perhaps there is method in the Reserve Bank Governors madness. If we all decided to start saving nobody would show up at the shops to spend. Consumption, which accounts for about 60 per cent of all economic activity, would go down and consequently so too would incomes and employment.

No good looking across the Tasman for answers. Their cash rate is even lower than ours; and anyway, they reckon they’re going broke.

“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists” - J. K. Galbraith

Read More...