As everybody by now knows, this is the latest sensation sweeping the world.  I must say I did not find the game particularly stimulating myself, but then I am really not very good at computer games anymore.  I have not played for years until I recently got an X-Box, but sadly I found that game like Halo and Gears of War are impossible for me.  I do like the way people collaborate and play online these days, and I think it is going to lead to more than just games in the future.  

Where Pokemon is quite clever is where it requires one to walk around, and uses your geographical location allowing you to find different types of Pokemon.  Cleverly, the application, which is free, encourages you to buy poke balls and so it generates income in that way.  

The game is so popular that you will see people walking around in all sorts of areas, and I have even been stopped on a golf course when I was walking with my phone on speaker phone to ask if I have found any Pokemon!  With the frequent services outages due to extreme use of the application using Pokemon on your phone also uses an incredible amount of battery, so much so that portable battery rechargers are selling out in various shops.  By 26 July, the game had been downloaded 75 million times worldwide and from iOS users alone was earning $1,6 million a day in revenue.  Have you played it?  Have you tried it?

Every now and then we will see on a movie, and it is normally what is considered an “arty” movie, the fact that it was featured at the Sundance Film Festival or won an award there.

Before you think it is just some freaky independent Film Festival somewhere, let me tell you a little bit about my research!  Firstly, it is held in Park City, Utah.  It is the number one ski resort in America and hotel rooms during the peak season, over Christmas for example, typically go at $1600 a day.  The Sundance Film Festival, held in the last 10 days of January, sees the same hotel charging $2000 and that is approximately a 4-star hotel.  

That pretty much puts it out of reach for all of us straightaway, but I was stunned to see the cost of the actual tickets.  You cannot get tickets for the individual movies – you have to take a package either for the last 5 days or so of the festival for $3000 or for the first 5 or 6 days of the festival for $3500!  If you are on a budget package, which is hard once you booked the hotels but presumably you can stay 45 minutes away for $200 a night, you can for “just” $450 see movies that show only before 11am in the morning or after 10pm at night.  It makes it pretty hard to get value for money because you will be going to bed after midnight and be expected to get up at the crack of dawn to watch your next movie.  That will only set you back $450 – now multiply that by R14,50 and the next time you see that a movie was at the Sundance Film Festival don’t think it was just a bunch of hippies watching weird movies!  If nothing else, and if they are hippies, they must be extremely wealthy hippies because 5 or 6 days of watching the movies at the normal time is going to set you back approximately R50 000,00.  That of course is not going to include your transport, your food or your accommodation.

I was quite impressed with some of the efforts that have been made on the Durban beachfront recently.  In particular, plants have been planted in quite a few areas to try and recreate the dunes.  The dune plants control the sand at the back of the beach and so a beach which has not had any plants on it for many years now has quite a bit of vegetation as this particular picture displays.  

I was also interested to read about the reconstruction of the Durban Bay of Plenty Pier.  It appears closed at the moment while they replaced it with a new wider concrete deck and geo-textile bags are going to be used to restore the design rock levels within the pier so as to change the current.  Research shows that the rip currents will alter the sandbanks and because they have been going through the piers, which are not normal, the sandbanks have changed. Sandbanks in turn relate directly to the waves, so the real purpose of much of this is to restore the normal rip current and thus bring back better and bigger waves to the Durban beachfront.  

In short, it appears that Durban is taking a lot of steps to make sure that the beachfront is modernised in an environmentally friendly way.  The plants that would have grown along the sand dunes many years before the city was more commercially developed, are replanted and that the wave patterns are restored to what they were.  I think it is to be applauded and hopefully it will lead to some of the big surfing events coming back to Durban.  I was quite shocked to see what I have always known to be the Gunston 500, which subsequently became the Mr Price Pro, is now called The Ballito Pro, and presented by Billabong.  I played golf with the former President of Billabong fairly recently, and quite honestly I had no idea as to the actual size of the company which is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.  In any event, I digress, what surprised me the most was that the event is now held in Ballito and perhaps the wave conditions had something to do with it. 

I think one of the theories I believe in, and I have certainly written about it before, is the birth order in which people are born and the role it plays with who they marry, and how they get on with others.  

Without going into it in great detail, essentially, and there are exceptions, an oldest child generally will get on better with a youngest child, in terms of marriage, and for example, two oldest children, if they are married, would normally have a lot of conflict.  The exceptions happen when there are gaps that are so big between the birth of children that a child may be the last born, but essentially brought up almost as an only child or eldest child, because of the huge age gaps.

I think of this quite a bit when I deal with my family because I resented it a lot, when I was small, that as an oldest child you are forever blamed by your parents as to anything that your siblings do wrong.  If they speak cheekily to the parents, the parents claim that they learnt it from you.  When they do something right of course, it was never learnt from you and as a result, and from an oldest child’s perspective, you are always to blame for something and almost never ever get credit.  

I thought about that when I spoke to my daughter the other day telling her that she must not just sit back while one of my other daughters does something naughty and she must do something about it and she said to me that they then reply to her, “You are not the boss of me”.  It just reminded me how many of the messages we give as parents are so contradictory, because I certainly do tell my children that nobody is in charge of anybody else and they must all speak up themselves, but then one sends a contradictory message of telling the oldest child that he/she must look out for the others.  I guess I sort of accepted that these contradictions are just completely normal and you have to tell children that they have to look after each other and at the same time that they are responsible for what they do themselves.  I guess older children will always come in for the most criticism, but in some ways they often get the best upbringing and the most attention from parents in their early years which often assists them in leadership roles.  

I am sure by now I have said enough things to irritate those who are not oldest children and I would love to know where you were born in your family’s sequence – in other words, are you a middle child, an oldest child or a youngest child – and what your perspective is as a result – How do you see oldest children typically, how do you see youngest children and how do you see middle children?

I fly a reasonable amount and have to say that leaving South Africa is one of the hardest things to do.  Not because it is a wonderful country, but because the immigration officials simply cannot process the people in time.  I recently spent more than 1 hour 20 minutes to go through security and immigration control and it was not because of security!  

There are never enough officials to deal with all the international flights in the evening, particularly not on a Sunday night and everybody has their own excuse.  The immigration officials struggle so much to cope that they even stopped the security people from scanning people until they can clear the queues.  The supervisor I spoke to claimed it was a new system that was causing the problems.  The actual immigration official I spoke to said that was nonsense and they are not on a new system, they are back on the old system and that he cannot be to blame if he came to work – suggesting that there were people who were meant to be at work, but who did not come.  I asked him why they did not hire more staff or deal with those and he pointed me to the supervisor, being the man that just told me it was due to the new system and so I should ask him.  

The security officials then told me the problem was that they had a staff shortage.  The bottom line is it creates a very poor impression on people that visit the country and you don’t want people to have to stand in queues for 1 hour 20 minutes before they leave (or for that matter enter), because apart from creating a poor impression you will force one or two of them to miss their flight and have to stay overnight in an hotel.  That is the best way to convince people that we live in an inefficient and poorly administered country and when we want to encourage them to invest in our country, to visit our country and to promote our country, we don’t need to create a poor impression on their way out!  When people walk in through the door to your house, your office or your country you need to look good and be friendly and efficient!

I must say that the automatic birthday wishes that one now gets from a variety of companies are unnecessary and meaningless.  To get an automated e-mail from a company, wishing one happy birthday, seems to me to be a bit meaningless.  I received a whole series of automatic e-mails from a variety of companies recently, all wishing me happy birthday and the only ones that had any meaning to me were those that were written to me either by staff members, family or friends.  I don’t want to receive an e-mail from my mobile phone company, wishing me happy birthday, unless it is coming with a nice free phone and I don’t want to receive the same sort of e-mails from insurance companies, brokers, etc because they are not telling me anything that is of any relevance to me about my account with them and it is not in any way personal.  

I think before one has computers simply sending out e-mails to a whole batch of clients you need to make sure that it is informative and relevant to them or contains something of interest to them.  To simply have a computer at a mobile phone company or at a cellular provider wishing me happy birthday is not a thrill.  Maybe I am just too grumpy – do you get happy when you receive those automated e-mails?  I would certainly be a lot happier if there was some sort of incentive or little token attached to it – a R100,00 off a birthday month account, for example or maybe even something less by R20,00, but to just get an automated e-mail does not come across as anything sincere.

There have been a lot of media about the Tesla Autopilot, just so as there is with everything involving Elon Musk.  Cars being driven by an Autopilot are of course something right out of science fiction movies and no doubt part of our future.  In the early days there is no doubt going to be many horrific stories, enquiries, investigations and the usual fuss.  I like what somebody wrote about the Tesla Autopilot review online, which another website picked up, where he said, “I actually think there are a lot of crap drivers out there, and I think this is probably better than a lot of people.”

That quote probably best illustrates what this story is about because around the world there is approximately one fatality for every 96 million km that are driven.  The Tesla Autopilot has already been driven for 210 million km before the first reported incident, so on pure statistics alone that is safer than most cars driven by human beings.  

The reality of the matter is of course there are going to be problems, of course there are going to be software issues and while the systems are in their infancy, people must play with these toys with care.  Don’t engage the Autopilot facility if you don’t have confidence in it and don’t get an Autopilot facility in your car until such time as they have been around for a few years.  The media loves to sensationalise stories and it is much more exciting to announce that somebody has been killed, while leaving out that he was watching a movie, while his car drove on Autopilot, than it is to just mention every minute of the day somebody else in the world was run over by a driver or two people collided at an intersection and due to human error another 2 or 3 people died.  It is something to bear in mind whenever you are watching the news – much of what you see is sensationalised and the unusual is picked up and reported.  In our firm’s experience, for example, we had a client who was on the back of a donkey cart when the donkey cart was hit by a car.  That of course made the media because it is different, it is weird and it made a much more interesting story.  

The media are looking either for a sensational award or an attorney who stole the money or some sort of freak accident.  They are not interested in the run-of-the-mill case where an attorney gets his client R1 million and the client walks away with R750 000,00 and the attorney has not stolen all the money.  That is boring, because that is considered normal and normal does not make the news.  So, the news will always be filled with the abnormal – a lightning strike, the alligator killing someone, the lions in the Lion Park killing someone, etc.  

I was impressed to hear about the sale of UFC.  In fact, when I first heard the words UFC I had no idea that it stood for Ultimate Fighting Championship.  That is the mixed martial arts sport, where they fight in cages, and the owners of the sport, because most sports that you see are actually businesses, although we often don’t realise that, recently sold it for $4 billion.  It is the richest sale in the history of professional sports, because whole sports are not invariably bought and sold, it is normally just the teams.  A number of basket ball teams have been sold in the $2 billion range, but that is just of course one team.  

The founders and owners of the UFC have done particularly well.  It was founded in 1993 and casino operators bought it for just $2 million in 2001.  By selling it for $4 billion in 2016 they have made a 72% per year annual return!  That is fantastic in a day and age when inflation is below 2% in the US and it just shows you how big a sport can become if properly promoted, once it gets onto TV and sponsors are found.  There is a lot of money to be made in sports, and it is time all of us stop looking at each sporting franchise as just a team that you support or don’t support, and start appreciating that in fact each and every one of them is in reality a business, and have their ups and downs and if the business is well managed, it can be sold for a huge profit by the team owner.  As the teams and the owners make more money invariably the players and participants also get paid more.

I have always been fascinated by how the US team chooses its athletes for the Olympics.  They have their own trials a few weeks before the Olympics, and if for example there are three places in the women’s 200m, then the first three ladies in that trial go through to the Olympics.  They don’t worry about the fourth lady who, won 100th of a second back, is the reigning Olympic 200m champion and because she came fourth in the US trials, will not be able to defend her title.  

That is very different to how we choose in South Africa.  We obviously don’t have the same talent pool, the same numbers as a country with a population of 330 million, so we choose our athletes partially on the basis of trials and partially on the basis of qualifying times and we make exceptions for people.  That does not really work, as we have seen in the results we get.  The American approach, which is harsh, at least forces their athletes to be in form 2 or 3 weeks before the Olympics.  If you are not, then it does not matter what you achieved 4 years ago, it does not matter whether you are the world record holder, the Olympic champion or number 1 in the world, if you don’t make the top three positions, you are not going.  

Obviously, there will be those who would say that is unfair – but then should the lady who came third not go?  Do you hold trials, have a champion beaten by somebody else and then send the champion instead of the person that just beat the champion?  You cannot do that and it basically forces people to perform on the day, and not be judged on their past reputation.  I think that is true of work as well.  It does not always matter what you have done at any time in the last 10 years.  

Today’s client is going to judge you on what you do today.  Being fantastic for 10 years will not excuse you if you put in a sub-standard effort today and mess up somebody’s case.  When you are watching the Olympics this year and you see how few medals we get don’t forget that it is not just because we have less people, it is not just because we have less money for sport – all of those things to make a difference – we also have far easier standards for making our Olympic team and truthfully, we will be sending a lot of people to the Olympics who simply don’t have any chance at all in their respective races.  Of course, in South Africa we love to have excuses, we love to make exceptions and we love to give people chances and as a result we send a lot of no-hopers along to the Olympics.  There are athletes who have been left at home in America who have far faster times than some of the athletes on the South African team who we are paying for to go to the Olympics.  

When you think about paying for people to go to the Olympics, how good would you like them to be before you fund their trip with part of your salary, in the form of taxes,  and the purchases you make at shops?  Would you like them to be real potential medal-winners or No 30 in the world?

I recently had occasion to travel on some domestic flights on SAA.  In both Johannesburg and in Durban I had the same problems.  At OR Tambo International Airport, in Johannesburg, I almost missed my flight because the check-in area was so under-staffed and the staff so slow in dealing with whatever problem they were dealing with, that it took approximately 30 minutes to check in.  

At King Shaka International, in Durban, the problems were similar.  In fact, the queue for service for business class was as long as economy.  It seems as if business class is under-staffed, so I went to the economy bag drop-off area where there was no queue, only to discover that, although airlines would like you to check in yourself, and then just use the bag drop queue, there was no staff member dealing with the bag drop queue!  If you checked yourself in you still had to go and join the check-in queue otherwise nobody would help you.  The overall service was shocking but I still prefer SAA to flying with small airlines who only have a few flights a day.