Skip to main content

Westake, Statues, Electricity, and our City and Country

Dear all

http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/00eba98047ffa988b8d2ff4405f77b26/Nine-arrested-during-Steenberg-taxi-protest-20150413

It took me 1 hour 40 mins to get to Westlake Business Park today.

It normally takes 45 mins during traffic and 60 mins on a bad day and 30 mins without traffic.

At least it kept the petrol companies happy!

But it really destroyed the productivity of every business in Westlake today and possibly this entire week due to additional stress.

Additional unnecessary stress after the recent fires in the area where people also couldn't get to work.

Some of us really want to work and continue helping to make South Africa great - for ALL its people!

For myself, I returned to SA back in July 1995. I left the OLD South Africa in 1987 and returned to the NEW South Africa in 1995, 20 years ago this year.

As you all know, my blood type is B+ (be positive) and I am an optimist. I believe that if you are a cynic or pessimist, then you cannot survive in South Africa.

South Africa is an incredible place. Full of possibility. It's time for our leaders to stand up to this racism and nip it in the bud.

When people resort to violence BEFORE they have even tried to negotiate, then we are in trouble. And when leaders, like the UCT Council, cave in without regard for due process, then they set a really bad precedent. And then when rival taxi associations resort to violence in the middle of a busy city intersection, when they could have met elsewhere, then we have a potential crisis. Fortunately the police took appropriate action and I salute them today.

I personally think that ALL statues and monuments should be removed in South Africa. Who wants to spend money building monuments, maintaining them and fighting about them, when there are so many more important things to think about like electricity, water, nourishment, our air, pollution, etc?

In the past few weeks, there have been hardly any articles in the newspapers about Eskom and the electricity crisis.

Before the Statue crisis, there were all sorts of letters and articles in the press every day.

The public have been sidetracked into this stupid behaviour and are missing the point. Without Medupi power station, which should have been completed 2 years ago and which should have started supplying the grid with electricity long before that, there are at least a million people without jobs. Another million people don't have jobs because Kusile power station is incomplete. And millions more don't have jobs because so much more of our energy resources are corroded or incomplete.

It's time for us all to refocus our energies where they are needed. Not on some past issues that non of us can resolve, but rather on working together to make this country how we all want it to be, a land of opportunity, a land of ubuntu, and a land of wealth and plenty for all.

Regards
David

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Designing your own electricity system - part 7 (fridges)

Here are some specifications regarding energy saving fridges. Tafelberg sell some of the Ardo range of fridges. The Ardo rating is: 130KWH rating per year. Even if it really uses 165KWH per year, that will be amazing as an A++ energy star fridge is rated at 380KWH per year and a normal fridge much higher than that. My normal fridge (which I still need to replace) uses approximately 660 kwh per year which at 70 cents per kwh (my rate) is about R40 per month. Note that this is only based on one day's usage. After a few months, I will have a more accurate number. The Ardo fridge uses about 40Watts when it is on and is so quiet that a friend on mind has it in his passage outside two of the bedrooms. At 165kwh per year , the Ardo fridge costs R10 per month. A normal fridge is about R2000 and an Ardo fridge is about R8000. The difference is R6000, so R6000 / R30 (saving) = 200 months = 17 years. Not a very good payback period, but remember what I said in an earlier part of this blog s...

Repair Your World: Solving the electricity crisis at no tax cost to the treasury

My latest letter to the Cape Times editor. Melanie Gosling's articles this week and NERSA today (24th February 2010) approving 25% increases (95% over 3 years) refer. My company has a number of clients who wish to provide their own energy. We don't believe that we can rely on Eskom energy. It isn't sustainable. It isn't clean. Not only is coal polluting the air, mining it is polluting our water resources and destroying our roads. If we weren't in a recession Eskom energy wouldn't be enough for our requirements, so there is no true security of supply, especially as Eskom has not got the increase they wanted. Lastly, in the medium to long term, Eskom's energy is not affordable for our clients and there are already affordable alternatives. However, most of the clients we consult to are too small to fit into the 1 Megawatt bracket which gets the feed in tariff (REFIT). And the REFIT itself is a farce because the government has implemented a tender system w...

Jewish people have some secrets. Here are two of them.

One of these secrets is that we have one day off a week. Another of these secrets is that we welcome dissenting and opposite views. We  welcome Outliers. The Zohar and Talmud are full of opposing opinions and views, even opposing legal  views. I’m studying The Zohar, the Ancient Book of Kabbalah, which dissects the Tanach  and shows why things have been said the way they’ve been said and why things  happened the way they happened. There are many times when I read something, and I  don’t agree with it. I know that if I wait then at some point I will get an opposing view,  which I may or may not agree with. There are even discussions about why a word might  have an extra vav, or why a word doesn’t have a vav. Unfortunately, this internal strength in Judaism is used by our enemies to undermine us  as they will find a Jew who is against Zionism or who uses words like Occupation or  Genocide to say that this is how Jews feel generally. Yet if they...