Investec Property is spending a lot of money in Rosebank, believing that it is becoming one of South Africa’s most coveted commercial and retail centres and of course that is good for anybody who has offices in the nearby area. Standard Bank’s new head office is in Oxford Road and the Rosebank Mall is undergoing a redevelopment which is going to double its size from 36,000 m² to 62,000 m².

Office vacancies in Rosebank have, since opening of the Gautrain Station, shrunk from 12% to 7%. Investec Property has bought the old Galleria and is planning to turn it into a mixed use development. It is going to have offices, retail and possibly also upmarket residential properties. The project will apparently link to The Firs and will ultimately comprise of three or four 10 storey buildings creating a mini Melrose Arch.

The trend in America now is for insurance companies to offer clients a reduction if they put a device in their car, and that device indicates that they are driving well. For clients’ privacy, the devices do not monitor where the clients drive, so they cannot tell whether you are driving 70 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, for example, but what they do tell is the average hours that you drive, when you do that driving and how often, for example, you brake sharply.

Essentially, if the data indicates that you are a good driver, and drive at times that are safer, then you are likely to see a 30% reduction in your insurance premiums. It is a great idea and it is something that appears to have been copied here, although without much fanfare and on a small scale but I think that one will find a situation in 5 or 10 years’ time that if you don’t agree to the installation of the device you will be penalised. Now the approach is not to penalize but simply reward those who do agree and subject to the data showing that they are driving well.

Insofar as driving at safe times is concerned, the data is quite clear, both here and in America, that driving for example after 11 pm on a weekend night is far more dangerous than before 11 pm and that is pretty much the case during the week as well. It makes it a bit tough for somebody who has a job that ends late at night, but the fact of the matter is when you are exposed to tired drivers, or drivers who have been drinking, you are certainly more at risk and the vast majority of accidents, and particularly serious accidents, happen late at night.
 

It stunned me that it took Apple so long to make it possible to purchase music on iTunes in South Africa and on 4 December 2012 they made it possible to buy music in South Africa and 55 other countries on iTunes. Not making music available to purchase I think would certainly have encouraged much more piracy because if you can buy a song for R8,99, most people are unlikely to go through the hassle of downloading it illegally, but with 1 million owners of iPhones and iPads in South Africa, this is undoubtedly going to be huge in so many ways.
More income for Apple, the end of the last few remaining CD stores in South Africa to a large extent, and possibly new movies and series to buy online in a few months.

I experimented by going to the Dance Singles Top 40 Chart in the UK, then searching for the number one song on those charts on iTunes, “Don’t you worry child”, by the Swedish House Mafia, and after a little bit of a tiresome process of re-entering my credit card, the song downloaded and was on my computer. Most of the songs are R6,99 to R8,99 and the albums such as Rihanna’s latest album, “Unapologetic” are R89,99. These are obviously cheaper prices than the rip-off prices we have to pay in CD stores for many years. You can also preview songs for 90 seconds before buying them.

Office 2013 is coming in the first few months of next year. The release is so close that Microsoft announced that, certainly in America, new purchasers of Office 2011 get a free upgrade to 2013 when it is released. It is obviously going to be a huge release and will find many buyers quickly although one finds these days that more and more companies lag behind with technology.

That has never been my philosophy, and I am sometimes amazed by how many attorneys, for example, are still running Office 2003 and in fact a number of developers of software programmes for attorneys in South Africa insist that you use Office 2003 because they have not upgraded their programmes yet to 2007, let alone to the version of two years ago! Right now, I am trying Windows 2008, which is quite a change from previous Windows and takes at least an hour or two to get used to.

A Federal Judge in the United States has ordered tobacco companies to publish statements, in various types of advertisements that they had lied about the dangers of smoking in the past. Approximately 1 200 people a day in the United States die as a result of smoking and each one of the advertisements will have to begin by saying that the tobacco companies, “deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking.”

The Judge wrote that the corrective statements are based on findings of fact made by the Court and that, “… the tobacco companies perpetuated fraud and deceived the public regarding the addictiveness of cigarettes and nicotine”. With all the statements about how they misled the public before, together with warning photographs, etc, one wonders whether there will even be space for the name of the tobacco company on the box of cigarettes. Personally, I think that given that the Courts have found this, and it is certainly true that less people would have smoked if they had understood the real dangers which were concealed from them by these companies, that it is an excellent idea and the American Courts are to be praised in that regard.

I am somebody who always rushes to get the latest technology and generally I find that it pays to be up to date and have more modern equipment. In this particular case, the latest version of Microsoft Windows has been a complete disaster for me. It really feels as if the product is not finished, not ready and should not be installed on an existing computer running Windows 7.

In other words, I would happily try it out on a brand new computer, with brand new software, but not on a computer running lots of different programmes, all of which invariably have not been updated as yet to Windows 8. In the first few days of running Windows 8 went find for me, with just my Nedbank Internet banking not working, but within a few days I started finding that a whole variety of programmes I used would no longer function, and that the computer, which is after all meant to run faster and better on the Windows 8, was literally freezing every 10 minutes – so badly that in fact the only way to switch it off was to use the power switch, because nothing else would reset the programmes or the computer. After a little over a week of using it, I asked my IT guys to reinstall Windows 7 because in my own experience, and that is running a powerful machine with the latest Intel boards and processes and plentiful RAM, Windows 8 was a disaster and rendered my computer basically unusable most of the day. That was not the end of the story though – they had to do a complete new reinstall and by that time I decided to stick with Windows 8 – albeit with a newly reformatted computer and a disastrous time in in finding all the program DVD’s to reload, licence numbers and not to mention all my documents and photographs etc having to be reloaded from backups.

The year 2012 is drawing to a close, and while Amazon has a list of the top 100 books, and the order of how they are selling on a daily basis, they also have a list that gives a more accurate picture of the entire year. That list is dominated by one author, E L James, who has the top three books in order, with the bestselling book of the entire year being Book 1 of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey.

To have the bestselling book of the year is an incredible achievement but to have the first, second and third bestselling books of the year is not only an achievement, but it is going to make you extremely wealthy and successful! I guess 2012 will turn out to be the year where more erotic literature came to the fore. I still have not read one of the books but I do enjoy the reviews such as this one, “You must read this! Oh, it’s awful. Don’t get me wrong about that. It is just as badly written and edited as its predecessors. But, as I’ve said before, it is literary crack. So bad for you, but so addictive.”

Steyn City has always fascinated me, because I drive past the development area quite often and I have watched the golf course slowly grow, firstly out of the windows of a house in Dainfern and now from the road. It appears to be finished, and probably has special winter grass, given that it was green throughout winter.

It is going to be a huge development and at last, because I’ve had a lot of queries from people who write to me about my blog, there is a website where you can find out more at www.steyncity.co.za. The site confirms that it will be launching in summer 2014, so one assumes that the stampede of a lifetime in terms of the northern suburbs, is going to take place in about October 2014 while everybody scrambles for the best pieces of land along the golf course. It is 2 000 acres in size with apparently 1 000 acres of woodlands and both the roads on either side of Steyn City are going to have their lanes doubled up from single lanes to double lanes in both directions – Cedar Road and William Nicol Drive respectively. The golf course itself is designed by Jack Nicklaus but the estate itself sounds like it is going to be self-catering with cafés, deli’s, medical facilities and even a crèche within the complex.

In a country with such a high death toll on our roads, and so many vehicles which are not roadworthy, I notice that the traffic police spend their time checking licence discs on William Nicol Drive. I have no problem with licences being checked, but sometimes it gets a little bit extreme – on one day last week I had my licence checked twice, once on Cedar Road and once on William Nicol Dive and that was after having being checked the day before on Malibongwe. It could just be that it is the end of the year, but this is a busy stretch of road in wealthy areas, and the cars travelling along the road are in a relatively good condition and let’s face it, there are very few serious accidents along those roads.

Why more time is not focused on more rural areas or areas where there are higher accident rates, I don’t know – or perhaps we do, because this appears to be all about revenue, but this is sadly just a short-term approach. On a long-term basis the country loses far more, as does the Road Accident Fund, every time somebody is killed or injured in an accident and concentrating your traffic officials on the same stretch of road checking somebody’s licence disc three times in two days and quite often four or five times a week really does not help much with anything other than generating revenue.

I enjoyed the book written under the pseudonym Mark Owen called “No Easy Day”. He was one of the Seal leaders on the raid on Osama Bin Laden. Written in an easy to read action style, the book describes what is, after all, just a different job. Putting new batteries in your equipment before leaving, packing replacement batteries, learning to duck after you have knocked on a door because people generally shoot through the middle of the door thinking that you are standing, etc and various other tricks of the trade are detailed in the book but of course most people will rush to the pages detailing the actual raid on Osama Bin Laden. “Mark” was on the helicopter that crashed and thought he was going to die before actually accomplishing the mission and was the second person into the room where Osama was killed.

In a way, what clearly stood out to him the most was that although from when the helicopter crashed on Osama Bin Laden’s compound, to when they actually killed him, 15 minutes had passed, gun fights had taken place with even his courier but Bin Laden himself made no effort to fight. His son popped his head around a corner when his name was called out, and promptly got two bullets in the head and Osama Bin Laden likewise must have known for at least 15 minutes that the compound was under attack. One would have expected from a man, who was quite happy to send suicide bombers to their death, to at least have put up more of a fight, and yet it seems that he and his men really were not very good at that, and he was spending far more time focusing on his hair dye, and trying to look young.

They are both very dangerous and best avoided. I think people have an inherent tendency within them to have a small bit of jealousy, about certain things, but sometimes it really gets out of hand. What amazes me is how we are all happy to believe stories and gossip when we are not involved, but when you are involved you sometimes realise just how ridiculous it is – or in the case of jealousy, just how far off target the other person is. I only have to look at office staff parties and the number of people who got trouble from their partners afterwards for allegedly “misbehaving” or showing too much interest in other guys.

Strangely enough its always the quietest, probably most conservatively behaved person at the party who is later accused by her boyfriend of misbehaving, of having drank too much or worse, flirting with the boss. In some cases, in reality, we are talking about people who don’t even say hello to the boss or any other male working at the office and yet the boyfriend seems to believe something is up! The funniest part of course is that generally at office parties everyone watches their behaviour far more closely than when they are out with their own friends, because there are always going to be repercussions and stories if you do cross the line. It is when you don’t cross the line, you don’t do anything wrong and still get trouble for it that it seems somewhat ridiculous. There will always be people who believe things that are not true, and unfortunately there are too many of them. One experiences that in business as well and sometimes one does take it seriously, but I have learned to ignore most of it.

Every year in November the Sunday Times announces their top 100 companies. It is not the top 100 companies to work for nor is it the biggest companies in South Africa but it is really just the companies whose share price has gone up the most over the last 5 years. Ultimately, either a new company or a company whose share price was down substantially 5 years ago is likely to then be the biggest improver over the 5 years.

This year the winner, with its share price up the most over the last 5 years is Capitec Bank where the share price has gone up 45% a year compounded over 5 years followed by Mr Price whose share price has gone up by 43% a year. Another big riser during the last 5 years is Woolworths whose share price 5 years ago was R17,90 and at the time the Sunday Times took the closing price, was at R60.79. What is noticeable, and that is perhaps because share prices have not increased tremendously over the last 5 years, is that to make the 100th position all your company had to do was to have a compounded growth of 3,4% a year. I think that also illustrates precisely how difficult a business environment it has been in recent years, why so many businesses have gone under, and why so many businesses are also struggling.

The Supreme Court of Appeal recently ruled on the issue of serious injuries. The judgment, and it is important for non-attorneys to know that judgments in law is spelt without two e’s – in other words, some people incorrectly spell it “judgement” – but the correct spelling is “judgment”.

The judgment itself was not what attorneys were hoping for and essentially it allows the Road Accident Fund at almost any time to now object to a serious injury form that is lodged with them, even if that is halfway through the Court process. There is no time limit, according to the SCA, as to when they can object by, and quite unusually they have made it the job of the attorneys representing the injured party to write reminder letters to the Road Accident Fund, and if those don’t work, to bring Court applications against them in terms of PAJA. That of course is going to lead to considerably more Court applications in Court and ultimately a lot more expenses for the Road Accident Fund to pay. It is somewhat of a pity that the Road Accident Fund is not the world’s greatest responders to correspondence, and that it is now being made the job of the plaintiff attorneys to remind the Road Accident Fund that they have to respond to the serious injury lodgement and decide whether or not they concede that it is a serious injury – something that they normally refuse to do. If they don’t then respond to those reminders letters, one will need to bring a Court application to compel them to respond and of course they will end up paying the costs of that application as well as the advocate’s fees for launching the application in the High Court but it is certainly going to add to the already expensive amounts of legal work involved in these types of matters. The judgment is known as the Lebeko judgment and a copy of it can be downloaded here.

A reported judgment of the Dutch Reformed Church vs Rayan Sooknunan holds a lot of interest for people who are interested in the issue of freedom of speech and the Internet. The judgment of Judge Satchwell confirms that there are always limitations placed upon one’s freedom of expression, having regard to human dignity, equality and freedom. In other words, you cannot express your opinion whenever and wheresoever and about whomsoever one chooses regardless of the consequences.

Much of the defamation in this case took place on Facebook and on a Facebook wall, and Rayan Sooknunan basically denied that he had control over what was written on that Facebook wall, but Judge Satchwell disagreed with this saying that your wall on Facebook is like a notice board in a public passage, and if people put things up on that notice board, in the public passage that are defamatory or unlawful, then the person who is in charge of that page, which is normally the user, has an obligation to monitor what is on that page and take those comments down. In other words, just because somebody else wrote it, you cannot ignore it and say it is not you, because its on your page and its your responsibility.

This is the same principle as a newspaper which has to take responsibility for the contents of its pages. Rayan Sooknunan also published the personal contact details of individuals as well as their e-mail addresses and the Court held that in doing this is a “gross invasion of privacy”. Only the individuals themselves can make available their contact details, if they want to make them available. An interdict was granted, Rayan Sooknunan had to pay all of the costs of the application and he was also directed to remove e-mail addresses of individuals that he had published, including that of an attorney as well as their residential and business addresses and to remove same from the Facebook wall. The lesson is to be careful of not only what you write on the Internet, but make sure that no forum or website where you have a page where others may contribute or write comments, contains any defamatory comments or unlawful comments or indeed violates the privacy of others by for example, without their permission, publishing their contact details so friends of yours or other people you know may harass them.