Solid-state drives are very expensive, but make an incredible difference to the speed at which one’s computer works. An SSD 256 GB drive costs approximately R2 200,00 at the moment and so it is probably not going to be put in every employee’s computer at whatever firm you work at, but if you have the money it is well worth putting it in your own personal computer. The major difference is that solid-state drives don’t have moving parts and use NAND flash memory and this allows much more responsive speeds and lightning fast boot-up times.

The solid-state drive is far faster than a normal hard drive and even though they are smaller, if you load all of your programs onto the SSD drive and perhaps save your photographs on an older, cheaper drive, you will find that your programs load far faster than before. Ideally you would put your Windows program, Outlook and Word, etc all on this drive and save all of your other documents, videos and photographs on a normal, conventional drive. A typical hard drive, and we are talking about the fastest hard drives, would probably read data at 200 Mb per second at the moment whereas a typical SSD drive would read the data at about 540 Mb, meaning that your programmes will load up probably three times faster on a SSD drive compared to the fastest hard drive, which most people won’t in any event have. Apparently another advantage that SSD drives have is that they are not susceptible to damage from vibrations or movement. Obviously, their cost will come down with time and when they do, we are going to see a lot more of them in the workplace.

A daily update, indicating the fuel price, which is boring for most can be obtained at this link http://www.cef.org.za/images/petrolprice/daily.pdf
What is interesting about it, particularly if we take the basic fuel price, is that it shows you how much of it is made up of taxes, so the basic fuel price was R7,52 on 21 March 2013 for 95 unleaded. While the Rand has recently lost value against the Dollar, trading at about R9,30 on 22 March, we are lucky in that the basic fuel price on the international market has gone down during that time.

On a Rand basis we should be paying approximately 21c more a litre at the beginning of April but the international price has gone down approximately 43c during that time, so if it was not for the extra government taxes to be introduced and the extra money to be paid towards the Road Accident Fund, we would be looking at a slight decrease in the petrol price at the beginning of April.  However add in those taxes and we are looking at a probable increase. Obviously, it again illustrates how important the Rand value is to us. If the Rand had stayed at the same level during this period, we would be getting a decrease despite the extra taxes going into effect.

I have always been a Tiger Woods fan.  For some unbelievable reason, that’s the exception amongst most golfers in South Africa.  To me he is the greatest golfer in the history of the game and betting against him or hoping to see him beaten is like going to the races and hoping the champion is beaten.  I like to see the best win, and win often and Tiger has been fantastic for the game of golf just like champion horses are for racing.   I can’t see why so many got so much pleasure from seeing his fall.

Some two years later, and following his 77^th PGA Tour win yesterday, he is once again back at No.1 in the world – and one should remember he fell to 58^th at one time.  Then his critics said he would never win again – anything.  They claimed players had lost his fear of him and would challenge him at the end of tournaments and beat him under pressure.  They were wrong on both counts.  Now that he has won 6 of his last 20 tournaments for a 30% winning statistic, they want to claim it’s all about majors.  They conveniently forget that Tiger is winning in a professional era with dozens of talented competitors for millions and not the 60’s when smaller numbers of professional players competed for small money and even the British Open was played midweek in Britain so that the usual golfing nuts and wealthy hackers could play the course on the weekend.   The truth is, you will never silence critics, they will always find something else to moan or grumble about and they will ignore the stats.

Statistics don’t lie – Tiger  Woods over his career has a winning rate of approximately 26% - higher than any other golfer in history and far ahead of Sam Snead at 10% of tournaments entered and Jack Nicklaus at 16%.  Golf is a sport where you lose far more often than you ever win and Tiger Woods has won a bigger percentage of tournaments and majors that he has taken part in than any other golfer in history – and by a mile too.  One day, when they are old, and he is acknowledged as the greatest of all time, I wonder if their memories won’t conveniently fade and they will remember him with some nostalgia?  After all, you now find nobody who supported apartheid and everybody ultimately respects the greatest. 

I like this quote from Golf Digest writer Ron Sirak, “Tiger has won at a clip the game has never known.  Savor that, enjoy that and, most of all, appreciate that.  We are watching someone whose achievements will be discussed as long as sport remains relevant.  And I know this: I won’t have to struggle to remember what I saw.  The greatness of Tiger Woods is burned in my memory.”

This is one of movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and all about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. It is based very much around the CIA operation, headed by a lady and there is perhaps less of the actual operation than people might imagine – the media is focused more on the intelligence operation and the battle to find him. That search is not just the tale of a cohesive team looking for him, but the internal politics of the CIA and it is a movie well worth watching. I preferred it to “Argo” but then again, I said that I also preferred “Lincoln” to “Argo” and that is also true. It has a similar theme to “Argo” and I think anybody who liked “Argo” will like “Zero Dark Thirty”. It is directed by Cathryn Bigelow who most will remember having produced the brilliant, “The Hurt Locker”. “The Hurt Locker” won 6 Oscars, including Best Director for her at which time she became the first woman to win an Oscar as well as Best Picture. This is another superb movie, on a similar “America at war” storyline and well worth watching.

I am sure that we all understand the excitement and attraction of a motorcycle or motorbike, and particularly the attraction that it holds for young men. I must say that in the last week or so I have lodged two separate loss of support cases against the Road Accident Fund where in both instances relatively young mothers have lost their husbands to motorbike accidents. It is always so sad to see things like that, and that people simply don’t want to accept the reality that on our roads to ride a motorbike is simply too dangerous.
It is playing with your life, it is taking an unnecessary risk and while it is always glamorous for young, reckless men to make statements like if they are in an accident, they want to die, in many instances they are going to be left in a wheelchair. You have so much more protection in a motorcar, and motorbikes are simply extremely dangerous, particularly to drive around the roads in a developing country which has an ever-increasing death toll where more than 40 people die a day on our roads, every day of the year.

We are terribly uncompetitive in South Africa when it comes to the cost of mobile telephone calls as well as data packages. That is undoubtedly because there are only three companies that are competing and if you had eight or nine, you would have much lower prices as is the case everywhere else in the world. It is at least good to see, with the mobile termination rates have dropped recently, that the cellular companies are beginning to compete a lot more and the Sunday newspapers are always filled with advertisements as to all the latest specials, which are considerably lower rates than we were all paying a few years ago. Vodacom has introduced the Red Phones which feature limitless calls and SMS’s. MTN says that their growth is coming from the medium to lower income groups, with most of their sales of data packages being driven by the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

A big fuss was made when Facebook reached 1 billion users, and Google Plus has recently hit 500 million users. I guess, through my Gmail account I am one of those users, but I can say that I don’t use it and their statistics indicate that 135 million people use the service daily. One of the features that is popular is Google Hangouts. With such fast growth, it probably would take not much longer than another year for Google Plus to get to a billion users. Do you use Google Plus or Facebook? How do they compare?

Dr Peter Cooper, the head of the Wits paediatric section, was quoted recently in the media suggesting a limit on medical negligence claims. It is not surprising to read this, because we have known for years that medical negligence claims would grow. That growth will come from two particular factors – the one being the fact that there is a lot more incompetence in the State Hospitals than one could possibly hope for or believe and secondly, because a lot of attorneys who used to focus on Road Accident Fund work, and because the Road Accident Fund work has decreased so much, have moved to this field. There is also the factor that it may well be in many cases where road accident victims were treated poorly by a hospital that the Road Accident Fund has ended up paying out the money whereas perhaps some of it should have been paid out by the hospital itself and was not solely as a result of the actual accident, but partially also as a result of medical incompetence.

The doctor apparently told a conference that he is aware of at least twenty pending claims against the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and said that the government cannot afford such claims. One would think that the first step for the government would be to fix up the paediatric section of the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and reduce the claims against it, rather than always try to simply cap the compensation of people who get injured or babies whose lives are completely ruined because of inadequate and incompetent medical services. Our website at www.personalinjury.co.za deals with medical negligence issues and you can read more about it on that website.

This year’s budget passed without any tax increases. It is however inevitable, in years to come, that the taxes are going to be raised and no doubt we are going to hear more about that from the person appointed to head the Tax Commission, Judge Dennis Davis. He lectured me at Wits University in tax, and is a highly astute and clever man who was an extremely popular lecturer. One of the problems in South Africa, is that out of a population of approximately 50 million people, only 6 million people pay tax and support millions of others who are not well-off.

Some don’t like that principle, but I have always believed that if one is lucky enough to have a job and be better off than many, there is a duty on you to contribute to society and others, and that is really what tax is about. There is of course also a duty on government, who spends our taxes, to spend it wisely for the benefit of the people, and not to waste them on ridiculous functions, on people who have been suspended from work for years but not fired, etc. There were also some references to the people who conduct their business in South Africa but have their companies based in Mauritius where they pay very low tax. That is an extremely popular tax dodge amongst many in the northern suburbs and it will be interesting to see how SARS goes about challenging this and putting an end to it. Many in Sandhurst and Dainfern will be somewhat anxious.

I would love to know what people think the modern dating rules are, because they seem to change with time. I saw an article recently that said that the old dating rule, for example, was that you should not accept a date for Saturday night after Wednesday. In other words, you cannot show yourself to still be available on Thursday or Friday for a Saturday night date. The article said that one of the new rules for ladies is to never accept or answer a call or SMS after midnight – which would make sense to me – because after midnight one is pretty much in desperation hour!

The old rule was not to call a guy but wait for his call and now the new rule, according to what I read in any event, is that you must wait at least 4 hours before replying to the first SMS or text from a new guy, and take at least 30 minutes to reply to each SMS after that. It is all about playing the waiting game of course and I would love to read any other rules that you think make sense or you would pass on to a 19 year old daughter or sister if you had one.

Petrol has now, for the first time, exceeded a cost price of R13,00 a litre in Gauteng for 95 octane, although it is cheaper at the coast. Only 3 years ago we were paying R8,10 a litre. Let’s not forget that next month sees another 23c tax increase on petrol with 15c being for the general fuel levy and a nominal 8c increase for the Road Accident Fund. There is also going to be another increase on 95 octane petrol soon because this Demand Side Management Levy or DSML has not been increased for quite some time.

Obviously, you can choose to use a lower octane petrol and avoid the higher costs of 95 octane petrol, but you cannot avoid the general taxes as well as the sliding Rand. The current increases were based on a Rand that was stronger than it is now, and if the Rand continues to show weakness, and I certainly hope it does not, then we could be looking at a total increase at the beginning of March of another 50c a litre from the current R13,08 for 95 octane petrol or R12,87 for 93 octane.

This is the time of year when I get non-stop e-mails from candidate attorneys seeking employment at the firm. They are applying not for now, but in fact for 2014, although there are some that apply for immediate positions. In the past week alone we received over 20 applications – and we don’t even have a position available.

It is really a sign of a profession that has too many people in it already, and has bigger and bigger numbers of people trying to become attorneys each and every year. There is very little work for the vast majority of them to do, and while of course many of them will end up being very successful, a lot of them will not. A law degree is however a great tool for business and perhaps as many as 50% of them ultimately will not end up in law. What many people don’t understand however is that a firm can only take on three candidate attorneys per director of the firm and that is per director who has been a director for three years or more, so you cannot just appoint other people as directors and then take on more candidate attorneys – they need to have three years’ experience of being a director. Our three candidate attorney positions are full at the moment.

A new book, launched only in mid-January in Britain, has reached No 1 on their sales list and it is about dieting. The book is called “The Fast Diet” and it is known as the 5:2 diet. It involves five days of eating and drinking whatever you want with two days of fasting. The book says that the real secret to weight loss is that after a little bit of fasting your body turns off fat storing mechanisms and begins burning fat. Fasting for two days a week sounds like far too much hard work to me, but it does not mean that you cannot eat at all – you are allowed two meals of 250 to 300 calories each and that would mean that you could have two boiled eggs for breakfast and a plate of steamed fish and vegetables for dinner – but that’s it! It is written by Dr Mosley and Mimi Spencer and no doubt it is coming to South Africa soon as well.

The whole scandal in England about horse meat being found in various burger patties and mincemeat products has now come to South Africa. The testing of mincemeat, processed cold meats and burger patties has revealed the presence of all sorts of other animals, including donkeys. I have written before about food safety and labelling, and it is really the same issue again.

There may well be people who are quite happy to eat the products that they are illegally putting into what is meant to be beef only, but they should at least have the choice of knowing what is in the product. It seems that big business knows no limits when it comes to making a profit – if it is cheaper to buy horses than to raise cows, then they will happily sell you horsemeat and pretend that it is the same thing. There are many, who in terms of their religion, are not allowed to eat certain types of meats and so the scandal has a religious angle to it as well. It appears that one of the big problems both here and abroad, is that there are simply not enough food inspectors to go around to the various factories and shops to inspect that what they are selling is indeed the real product, and so we have, even in highly regulated societies like Germany, hens sitting in cages and their eggs being labelled as free range organic eggs.

There needs to be a lot more policing in terms of health inspectors around the world, and those who want a better product are going to ultimately have to pay for it. If it is important to you, you will also have to shop carefully, using a store that has a reputation for checking its suppliers and perhaps paying a little bit more at the checkout point.
Recent DNA testing of various fish sold in restaurants and shops has indicated that in many cases the fish we are sold are not what we paid for! For example, tuna sold as yellowfin tuna is often in fact a much cheaper version of tuna called skipjack. An endangered fish called the river snapper, which is illegal to sell or buy, is sometimes sold in South Africa as “red snapper”.

The Post Office strike is affecting all of us. I am not just talking about magazines that you may get in the post, or accounts that you are now happy to not receive, but important letters and business documents. We use the post to communicate with our clients, although obviously we also do so via e-mail, and it is extremely disruptive to a business when clients cannot send their documents by post remembering that many clients may not have e-mail.

The illegal strike started on 14 February 2013, it has been confirmed by a Court that the strike is indeed illegal and one wonders why the strikes simply go on and on. I think that the reality is that employers never crack down hard enough and fire the whole lot of the workers. People who are participating in illegal strikes are not protected and the lesson they should learn, in a country where we have approximately a 30% unemployment rate, is that they lose their jobs, and are simply out of work. That would send the message that needs to be heard by people who go on illegal strikes.

This is the movie that won the best picture award at the Oscars and is another very successful project for Ben Affleck. He directs the movie and is the first director of a movie that has won best picture to not have been nominated as best director, and he also acts in his own movie as he has done previously. In fact, unlike Quentin Tarantino who makes guest appearances in his movies, he is the lead actor in this movie.

It is an exciting story and I enjoyed it, but I cannot say that it is better, in my view, than “Lincoln”. It is based on the true story of spiriting 6 Americans out of Iran, with help from the Canadians, by pretending that they are all involved in the production of a movie. That movie, a science fiction movie, allegedly to be set in Iran was called “Argo” and that is from where the movie obviously takes its title. It is an excellent movie, very watchable but I would have voted for “Lincoln” for best picture if I had a vote and one wonders if, part of what swung the vote in Argo’s favour was the fact that when the members of the Academy, who are after all actors, actresses, directors and producers, were faced with a choice between a movie with a historical tale to tell and a more recent piece of history where Hollywood helped rescue the people in Iran via their efforts with a fake movie, that they did not just choose the story that was about their industry. People will always be biased towards a story that is all about them and makes them look good and no doubt that helped with votes.

I read an interesting article on Motley Fool the other day. It was a reference to a discussion with Steve Jobs and the fact that he spent one whole day a week, even when he was the CEO of Apple, interviewing people.

He did that he said, because he thought that a really good worker was worth not 3 times what an average worker is worth to a company, but 60 times. He felt it was his job to weed out the average worker, and he could achieve far more for his company by trying to ensure a bigger percentage of really good workers than of average workers, and so as the CEO, he spent 20% of his time interviewing people. I think it is true of any company that there are those who can just get on, do their work and achieve results and there are others who unfortunately don’t seem to enjoy working 40 hours a week, and need to be monitored, watched, warned and trained all of the time. How much of that you can pick up in an interview is another question but some of the deadbeat boyfriends accompanying girlfriends to interviews tell you all you need to know. It’s amazing how poor an impression some candidates do make, and while one will always make mistakes, there are many people who make such a poor impression that you continue the interview for a few extra minutes out of politeness alone.

Many ignore the currency exchange rate, thinking that if they are not travelling overseas it is not really affecting them. Nothing could be further from the truth when one has to factor in the costs of petrol. We are looking at a huge increase this coming month, and that is before whatever increases the government puts on general taxes and Road Accident Fund on budget day.

The budget speech will be on 27 February and normally the increases announced then are effective at the beginning of April. That means we are almost guaranteed to see two consecutive months of petrol prices going up and March’s petrol price increase, and of course it depends on how the Rand trades from now until the end of the month, is looking like it could be as much as 85c. Add on an estimate of at least another 20c in government taxes and Road Accident Fund levies in April, and I would suggest it is probably more like 30c, you may well, by the first week of April be paying R1,10 a litre more than what you are now and that is assuming that the Rand stabilises. If we see any further weakening of the Rand it could be as much as R1,50 a litre extra when we already have high prices.