Motorway madness in Portugal 14 May, 2012 – Mike Beggs is a regular
business traveller to Europe and he has watched the European project break down
into chaos over the last few years. This is his report on his recent trip to
PortugaI.I have just returned from a business trip to Portugal with a potential
fine of 27 (£25) and a possible Portuguese Police criminal record. So what was
my crime? I hired a car from Hertz and drove it on the new motorway, paid for by
an EU grant!
In September 2011 the EU imposed an austerity package on Portugal. This included
putting high tolls on the excellent motorway system. But the Portuguese had
never before charged motorway tolls, so there are no toll booths to be able to
collect the money.
Under a directive from the EU, the Portuguese Government overcame this by
installing cameras along the motorways, telling all Portuguese number plate
motorists that they must pay the tolls. But how?
They must go to the Post Office after 2 days but before 5 days, to pay cash.
Clearly this programme, like so many other mad EU schemes, will not work and
especially for those hiring cars. The result is that no Portuguese driver uses
the motorways. They are deserted, empty of traffic! But the ordinary roads are
overloaded and the town centres are chaotic. The ordinary roads are breaking up,
but road works are all cancelled because of the EU austerity measures.
Business is suffering and the chances of economic recovery are receding.
But how does this affect me and any other visitors to Portugal this year? Well,
I collected my rental car at 7 p.m. at the airport and drove to my hotel.
Dutifully, 2 days later I went to the Post Office.
I asked what I owed for one short trip. The counter lady advised Your car was
used for three motorway journeys that day, you owe 9.90. She wanted me to pay
for the previous hirer who, quite logically, left on a plane earlier that day!
When I refused to pay for someone elses tolls I was told You will get a fine
and a criminal record!
She would not accept part payment what I owed, so I left without paying
anything.
But this left another problem. I still had to drive back to the airport on the
motorway to return the car so how would I pay. I asked the staff at Hertz. Their
advice was It is best that you dont use the motorway on the last 2 days of
your stay in Portugal. But the only way to get there and not miss my plane was
to drive on the motorway.
At the airport I went to the Post Office. I asked to pay for the trip and she
said the system is crazy you have to come back in two days to pay for it,
because the scanning equipment does not advise us until then! I left the Post
Office unable to pay for the trip I had made.
When I handed the car back to Hertz, I told the manager what happened. He
gloomily explained Well, you will get a fine and a criminal citation in about 5
months time.
So, my recommendations are:
Dont travel to Portugal where EU austerity equals empty motorways, traffic
chaos elsewhere, and an impossibly mad system for the collection of motorway
tolls from overseas visitors.
Michael Beggs
Lymington

You see, locals pay these tolls by having a transponder in the car (costs, from memory, €25 or something and you get your first 10 trips a month free, at least this year we do). But the car hire companies have not installed these transponders.

At which point we could say that it’s all the car hire companies’ fault. But, at least where we are on the Algarve, we get a lot of foreign cars too. Especially Spanish, coming over for the beaches in August. And they all face exactly the same problem: in fact worse, as the only way you can get from the Algarve back into Spain (without a huge detour at least) is over the one bridge which is the motorway which has these tolls on it. By definition you will be outside the country and unable to pay that particular toll.

So yes, it really is a governmental fuck up as well as a car hire company one.

BTW, if you do some to the Algarve this summer you really are going to face this problem. There are three east west roads, the 125, which goes through the coastal towns, one after the other along the coast. This is appallingly congested and takes forever. Which is why they built the A 22, the motorway formerly free and now with these new tolls, parallel and perhaps 5 to 10 km inland. When it was toll free it was great, relieved the pressure on the 125. Now, not so much. The tolls are high compared to local wages of 500 € a month you see.

Then, another 10 km inland or so there’s the 124. Which is tiny, windy and please don’t use it as that’s what we locals do.

And other than that there really is no way to go east west. Unless you want to go 50 km north and then do so.

It really isn’t the very bestest piece of traffic management planning ever.

The world has read the adventures of Superman, Spiderman, Wonderwoman, Batman and other American superheroes and now, perhaps, it’s time for Kazakhstan’s Astanaman.

Competitors can choose the story behind the character, his or her appearance and special traits but the organisers insist that as well as being named after the capital city the superhero must also represent Kazakh national characteristics.

Special power: Knows who to bribe

Activities: Theft of businesses from those who do not pay appropriate bribes.

Costume: Savile Row suit from the glittery end of the range.

Equipment: Watches of ever more staggering expense.

Anything else anyone deem appropriate?

Topping the list released in the May issue of the magazine was Vladimir Kim, the close confidant of President Nursultan Nazarbayev and chairman of Kazakhmys, the London-listed copper producer.

Forbes Kazakhstan, which has not published its rich list on the internet, estimated his wealth at about £2.2 billion. …Several other people linked closely to Mr Nazarbayev appear in Kazakhstan’s wealthiest top ten people, including his daughter, Dinara Kulibayeva, and her husband Timur Kulibayev.

Their wealth is estimated at roughly £810 million each and derives mainly from the finance and energy sectors. ……..The youngest person in the list is Nurali Aliyev, 27, Mr Nazarbayev’s oldest grandson. He is ranked at 25 and is credited with earning around £120 million through various finance positions. …….Mr Nazarbayev’s oldest daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, ……..Ms Nazarbayeva ranks at 13th on the Kazakh rich list with an estimated wealth of £370 million. …….

You might wish to complain that success in the UK depends rather upon who you know, who you are related to. But there are places rather more feudal in their arrangements…..

Others felt it was more like a wholesome nightclub where everyone was focused on the music and on dancing instead of getting drunk or finding someone to hook up with. There was a distinct lack of sexual energy at the Stockholm Lunch Beat, which, coupled with the ban on alcohol and drugs,

If you take away everything that makes a nightclub interesting then why bother?

The French don’t really believe in markets.

I was (uselessly, I know) hoping for Le Pen and Melenchon in the second round. Just for the sheer joy of watching what happened next as two loons fought it out.

In a candid interview, Mr Deripaska said he paid protection money to criminal gangs. He also built up his own security unit of former KGB agents and Red Army soldiers, as well as paying the local police for protection.

A source close to Mr Deripaska said that he was forced to pay gangs to stop his staff being threatened.

“The payments are called krysha, money paid to protect clients. It literally means roof in Russian. You are paying to protect your roof,” the source said.

Mr Deripaska said: “The first time I was directly threatened … two weeks later my commercial director was shot two times in the head. This was how, finally, I decided it was better to pay for the moment to stay alive and for my people to stay alive.”

That’s simply what the place was like. Is like.

You had a choice of krisha, this is true. You had to make sure that your krisha was powerful enough to either fight off the others or at least come to some agreement with the others. But a krisha you had to have and a krisha you had to pay for.

One of my suppliers lost his export licences recently entirely because his krisha lost power and another wanted to start charging the requisite “taxes”.

*Shrug*. That’s just the way it is.

The reason to watch this is that the desire for political liberalization doesn’t strike most populations until the per capita income gets high enough: in the $5-10K range.
…..
China is not run by a dictator, it’s more of a junta: a small collection of men who collude politically. Microeconomics teaches us that collusive arrangements are not stable.

All rather fun and informative. A very good primer….

Money from the employees’ fund at the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) is alleged to have been used to send the son of a police chief in Kazakhstan, where the company mines for iron ore, to college 6,000 miles away in the United States.

It is claimed money was removed from ENRC’s subsidiary SSGPO to finance the education of the son of Kazakh regional police commander, Bulat Baizhasarov, at Michigan State University.

This is both very naughty indeed and very normal: in fact, in one way, it’s surprisingly honest.

The question is, by whose moral and business standards should we be measuring this?

Leave aside for the moment that this is an allegation, entirely unproved and no doubt only a malicious invention by a disgruntled employee.

Start from our view: this is a London listed company, part of the FTSE 100 and thus rightly considered to be playhing by London rules. This is an outrage, disgusting fleecing of the corporate coffers and people should be jailed.

Look at it by the standards of many parts of the world and it’s just how things are done. The local power brokers get a cut of any economic activity that happens in their area. While we don’t call it this it’s really no different from our own feudal times. You own an area, you get a cut. These days it might not be a geographical area of which you are Duke but it might well be a port of which you are customs chief (and we’ve had similar positions in our own feudal times) or indeed an area of which you are police chief (and there have been Margraves and Marches Barons which were not far off exactly that).

By the standards of Kazakhstan this is actually very weak beer. Almost sweet in its innocence in fact. Sticking the kid on a corporate scholarship? What happened to demanding vast bribes, in cash, in advance of not doing anything?

I know someone (listed company too) who once paid $50,000 to an aide just to get an interview with the PM of the country. To try to find out why they were nationalising, with no compensation, the company he’d just paid the government hundreds of millions for.

$100,000 a year as a scholarship to keep the local major general of police onside? Cheap at the price in that environment.

Which returns us to our basic question: whose morals, whose business practices, should we be using when we deal with Johnny Foreigner? We’re qadvised to speak the local languages, adopt the local customs of greetings, use local law in contracts: how far should we be willing to go?

It’s not for nothing that until recently you could declare bribes to foreigners as a tax allowable expense in your company tax return: bribes to anyone at home meant jail.

The Argentine government has been tightening the noose on Repsol over recent months, withdrawing operating licences and accusing the company of failure to invest adequately in its Argentine operations.

So, in order to increase foreign investment they’ve decided to confiscate a foreign investment.

That’s going to work well isn’t it?

A century ago Argentina was one of the two or three richest countries on the planet. Now it most distinctly ain’t and there’s more than a sneaking feeling that the economic policies of the past century help explain why.

the nationalisation of energy companies (as energy sources are public goods)

No they ain’t. They are both rivalrous and excludable so they just ain’t public goods.

Renounce European Court, Britain urged
Britain should turn its back on the European Court of Human Rights because its rulings on the extradition of terrorist suspects risk undermining the special relationship, a former US ambassador said.

For I do think we should withdraw from the Council of Europe (seriously, who thinks it is a good idea to have Russian and Belorussian judges ruling upon our human rights?) and thus the ECHR.

However, I don’t think that handing people over to the US Govt is a good reason to do that.

For a start, we Brits should have exactly the same protections against extradition to the US that US citizens have against extradition to the UK. You know, this stuff about presentation of evidence, proof of a prima facie case etc which currently does not need to happen.

And I certainly don’t think that people should be bundled upon a plane because a Bush Era mustache thinks that they bad ‘uns because they’re Muslim radicals.

The place doesn’t have a good record on fair trials of such at present, does it?

Actually, to be honest, it’s probably a good idea that I’m not a politician with responsibility for such things. For I’d sit down and talk to my oppo thusly:

“We do not deliver British citizens to jursidictions where they will not receive a fair trial. Once you try the lot you’ve already got in the open, under the same laws and rules that apply to everyone else in the US, then we’ll talk about the new ones you want. Until then the “land of the free” can fuck off matey”.

That would probably have the US Marines storming the beaches at Hove but what the hell, liberty and freedom are worth Hove aren’t they?

Or as it turns out, not a dilemma for a UKIPPER at all. We Brits have rights because we are Brits and it is our government’s duty to protect those rights from all comers, whichever flavour of Johnny Foreigner they may be.

A group of British and American banks have been threatened with legal action by the Argentine government for advising and writing research reports about companies involved in the Falkland Islands’ £1.6bn oil industry.

The full letter in translation is here.

The essence of their claim is that a company which writes a research note on a company exploring for oil in the disputed territories could be subject to penalties under Argentine law.

That is, free speech in London, it is claimed, is ruled by the opinions of the Buenos Aires courts.

The correct answer to this is of course: “Fuck off matey”.

Then again, Argentina is the country where they prosecute economists for independently calculating the inflation rate. So we probably shouldn’t expect any better from them the ignorant Fascist Dagoes.

Wang Ling was 25 years old when she ended her life on 7 January 2011 by jumping from her brother’s high-rise flat, days after being dismissed from her job as an engineer at Foxconn’s Longhua factory. An employee of over six years’ standing, she had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

It would be easy to dismiss Wang Ling’s case as a tragic exception, were it not for the fact that she was the 15th Foxconn employee reported to have committed suicide since the beginning of 2010. There have been at least two since.

Yes, 17 suicides is 17 tragedies.

However, the firm has over 1 million workers. In a country where the average suicide rate across the whole population is 20-22 per 100,000 per year.

17 per million over two years, 20 per 100,000 per year.

There are a number of qualifications one can make to these suicide numbers it is still extraordinarily hard to make the case that this rate shows that conditions in Foxconn are worse than conditions in China generally.

XINQING FURNITURE manufacture professionally diet glass table, diet chair, Coffee table, console table, TV cabinet, which are elaborately made of carefully-selected materials, and novel in styles. The products are a combination of glass, marble, glossy MDF, leather, and hardware. Smooth and simple in lines, entrusting a life to steel, turning wood into intelligence, facilitating a unity of actual value and aesthetic value, possessing expression of a complete self-individuality of modern beauty and fashionable beauty, forever full of vigor and vitality. Advancing with the times and putting scientific technology top are the promise of Xingqing Furniture Factory for the clients. Our vocational norm is to respect knowledge innovate nonstop, use the first-rate design, the consummate manufacture and the perfect after-ale service.

It’s a real pity that it’s a furniture company. Wouldn’t it be so much better if it were a transport company? For the after-ale service is so often associated with the village bike……

The silent film The Artist, a tribute to the golden age of Hollywood which has been described as the most joyful film of the year, took three of the five big awards at this year’s Oscars including Best Actor for Jean Dujardin.

Don’t let anyone speak French in it.

Which is going to arrive/leave from platorm 3. So I am on platform 3.

The station has 6 platforms. Number 6 is by the exit, and is reached by stairway 1. Numbers 5/4 (different ends of the same platform) and 3 are reached by stairway 2.

Platforms 1 and 2 are reached by stairway 3.

So, does the Hamburg Express arrive/leave from platform three, as the listings, my ticket and the station announcements all say? No, of course it doesn’t, silly. It leaves from platform 1 which is above stairway 3.

When I talk to the train conductor (who is having a quick breath of fresh air at the halt and this being an international train yes, he speaks English) he says yes, Platform 3 means up stairway 3, not anything as stupid as what is actually marked as platform 3.

Dang, why are the English so dim? Are you a conservative or something?

Ho hum. And that is today’s news from parts foreign.

The Prime Minister added: “In the spirit of this healthy competition with France… If France goes for a financial transactions tax, then the door will be open and we will be able to welcome many French banks to the United Kingdom and we’ll expand our economy that way.”

“If France wants to be so mindbogglingly stupid about it then we’ll take advantange of having a mark at the table, don’t you worry.”

Here’s what the real problem is though. Are the French actually so mindbogglingly ignorant and stupid as to think that an FTT is a good idea? Or have they something up their sleeve?

It’s possible that they do think it’s a good idea: economics/finance has never been something that the Enarques quite get. They tend to see politics and the decisions of technocrats as somehow over ruling the movements of markets. Certainly they believe they should and they might even believe they do.

Or it could be that they know that an FTT is a bad idea, most especially one imposed in only one country inside a Single Market with the free movement of capital, companies and labour. But they’ve got some ace up their sleeve: perhaps they’ll use the movement of business resulting from the FTT as an argument for its extension?

Anyone any ideas?

Two bombs planted by Irish Republican Army dissidents detonated on Thursday night in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, but no injuries were reported as police quickly evacuated the area following phoned warnings.

This is pretty much the way it’s been going for a century now.

One group starts to fight for that United Ireland free of the British. They fight, there’s some movement or not some movement towards the goal, those fighting die, grow old perhaps, and compromise on the new status quo and stop fighting. But then there’s a new generation who regard the new status quo as not enough and decide to take up arms for the next leap towards the goal. Old IRA, Real IRA, 32 County and so on…..I’m sure I’ve left one of more generations out of this.

Note that I don’t say that this is entirely accurate in detail, only that it’s possible to see this pattern. Which makes this:

“These are the desperate actions of yesterday’s men. They seem to be more wedded to the struggle than to the cause they claim to be pursuing,” said David Ford, justice minister of the unity government.

Inaccurate. They’re doing exactly what every previous generation has done. Exactly what McGuinness and Adams did, refuse to take the settlement reached by the previous generation as acceptable and taken up arms to over turn that settlement.

Yes, they’re still terrrorists, vile scum who will kill the innocent for vague political goals, but they’re hardly doing anything unusual in the history of Irish Republicanism.

Newt Gingrich has pledged that on his first day as president he will set up a constitutional showdown by ordering the military to defy a supreme court ruling extending some legal rights to foreign terrorism suspects and captured enemy combatants in US custody.

The Republican contender told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South Carolina’s primary election that as president he would ignore supreme court rulings he regards as legally flawed. He implied that would also extend to the 1973 decision, Roe vs Wade, legalising abortion.

“If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it,” said Gingrich to cheers.

The oath is to uphold the Constitution. And it’s the Supreme Court that decides, barring amendments to that Constitution, what that Constitution is.

Which leads to more than a little amusement. If there were a President Gingrich (God Forbid….and I’m afraid that I can’t see any in the current race (from any party) that I would actually want to have that office. Yes, even Ron Paul, there’s some good stuff there but some very weird too) then he’d be impeached as soon as one of these stand offs occured. And rightly so of course.

The amusement would come from the way in which it would be the outraged left which would lead the impeachment charge and, if he’s tried and convicted and refuses to leave, then quite possibly removed from office by the military at the instruction of the Supreme Court.

You know, exactly what happened in Honduras and boy, didn’t the US left complain about that?