Sitting is The New Smoking

Oxfam Warns Unjust Society Not Sustainable

The recently published report has a number of interesting stats including:

1. 1% of the world's richest are wealthier than the remaining 99%
2. 8 men are as rich as the planet's 50% poorest
3. income growth for the bottom 50% has been zero over the last three decades while the top 1% have enjoyed a corresponding increase of 300%
4. it takes 10 years for the poorest person in Vietnam to earn what the richest person there makes in a day

The report also highlights how politics may be highjacked so that rules are written in favour of the 1%. I guess a bit like the Sithanen flat tax which has caused 22,000 Mauritians to be thrown into poverty over the first five years of Shaitanomics while incomes for the bottom 10% have risen five times slower than the corresponding income for the top 10%. There's also a trillion-rupee GDP shortfall and the very dumb policy of 'competitive depreciation' which has quickly dumped us into a recession -- in USD terms -- a mere three months after the December 2014 polls.

Voters Pick Unsuccessful Candidates Wisely

These are the eight unsuccessful candidates in the 1982 elections that got the highest vote shares in their constituencies. They would have no doubt been a much better opposition than the one we got. Picking additional candidates like this will make sure we have an opposition of minimum size when we need it the most and dovetails nicely with a common sense return to 40+2 single member constituencies. This would also satisfy the UNHRC ruling in a thoughtful way without compromising any of the incredible advantages of our FPTP system. While avoiding the PR-related mess we witnessed in Rodrigues.

Obama Returns To Chicago For Farewell Speech

iPhone is 10

It's 9h41am in San Francisco on January 9, 2007 when Steve Jobs starts introducing the product that will change everything. Mike Lazardis, co-CEO of BlackBerry, is puzzled for a few months until he opens one and stares at its guts. And doesn't find anything that makes him happy: he understands that he might now have to compete against a Mac. Microsoft derides the touchphone in public. But Gates would eventually use one.

Blackberry would still go on to more than double its market share to 20% over the following couple of years. By which time the iPhone would have seized 17% of the global market. And help Apple become the most valuable company in the world.

More than a billion iPhones have been sold so far. A little bit more than the 10 million that Jobs had expected to sell by the end of 2008.

Mauritius in 2017

Thousands will again be denied a place in a secondary school because of a badly designed learning experience. Our roads will kill another 140. Eight or nine amputations will be performed every week or about 400 for the full year. Mauritius will shutdown around Saint Valentine as soon as we get some heavy rainfall. The CWA will announce harsher cuts right after. We will send a team to the IMO for the first time and get ready to participate in PISA 2018.

Roughly 1,000 people will be thrown into poverty. Every three months. Thanks to the trickle-down economics which has been going on for a decade now. The flat tax trap will cause the GDP shortfall to reach a trillion rupees about half of which would have happened on Lepep's watch. This will make government increasingly unpopular. Voters will keep on getting smarter. And that will be bad news for our political class. The water supply will improve as Bagatelle dam comes into operation in the second half of the year. Potential tragedy of a horrific number of fatalities during Porlwi by Light.

Quite a few of the bad events don't need to happen or can be mitigated. Like how does Mahebourg by Light sound? We could also avoid several road deaths if Lepep recognises that it might have acted in haste and brings an improved point system back.