How the Two O'Clock Rule Saves Lives

When attempting the roof of the world do so by 14h00. If you haven't forget about it and return to the safety of your tent. Otherwise your chances of surviving and being present at your own funeral fall by a lot. Because you'd be spending way too much time in the Death Zone where oxygen is really scarce. And be exposed to horrific climatic conditions in complete darkness. Failure to observe this rule in May 1996 led to eight deaths on the slopes of the 29,000-footer.

10 people lost their lives in a small perimeter in Port-Louis on 30/3. That was during the day. With most people in office buildings. What do you think would have happened if it was at night and there was a compact crowd of tens of thousands of people of all ages in the streets?

Cyclones Pose New Risks to Mauritius

Gone are the days when an intense cyclone like Claudette would shrink our GDP by about 8%. That's because four decades later sugar weighs about nineteen times less in our economy. The risk now is being visited by a series of cyclones in a much shorter period of time. We will have a lot more flooding so we need to prepare for this with drains that are not built to accommodate the rainwater of one large cyclone in a month but like three of different sizes in three weeks or less. Contingency plans will therefore have to be carefully updated. So should our relationship with fellow creatures.

How Humans Broke Free From Soothsayers

Bernstein traces that moment to when the modern theory of probability was accidentally developed by Pascal and Fermat when challenged with a centuries-old puzzle posed by an Italian monk. This was to provide a strong starting point for humans to use numbers in making decisions about the future. And this meant the beginning of the end for soothsayers.

His award-winning bestseller chronicles our progress in improving the mouse-trap over several centuries. The late John Kenneth Galbraith recommended that no one should miss it. You can have it sent to you by clicking on the image below.

US Has Plan For the Too-Big-To-Fail Darlings

According to the New York Times, the United States are about to give themselves more options to deal with the gigantic risks that such firms create for the economy at large. These include kicking management out, taking control of the firm and playing around with their capital structure so as to minimise the risk to the system as a whole (the so-called systemic risk).

A fair response, I guess, to the uproar of throwing good taxpayers' money after bad behaviour.

Bigger Than the Madoff Scandal

Yeah. The STC hedging loss of Rs2.9 billion translates into about 1.1% of our GDP which stood at Rs263 billion at the end of 2008. That a percentage of the US economy would be worth about USD158 billion or if you prefer 3.16 times larger than the USD50 billion Madoff scam. Besides, the STC didn't have to do any oil hedging given that all price increases inclusive of the unfair 15% VAT are passed to us as have been the case for the past three and half years now. Which makes it all the more urgent and necessary to find out how this really happened and why.

We also have to find out precisely what led to the hedging mess at Air Mauritius which is the equivalent of almost 6 Madoffs. Explanations offered so far by both MK and its biggest shareholder have been far from satisfactory.