Italy's horse of a different color

  EMBRACE THE SUCK Dedicated to the many, MANY wonderful intelligent persons I met through twitter. In a world where my measure of men and women is “a good person to have in a storm”, I would want you all on my boat. Italy is following hard on the heels of Macron's France in designing and enforcing Vaccine Passports internally instead of enforcing a COVID vaccine mandate. The intent, in both cases, is hampering the lives of citizens enough to “nudge” them into going in droves to vaccine hubs, arm extended. And it won't work. And it will NEVER work, in my opinion. Sorry. For that you need a spreadsheet. Imagine, if you will , that an unknown force transported you back in time to the early expansion of tribes of Homo Sapiens. You are given a choice: you can join one of two otherwise identical tribes of about 1.000 people, with similar territories. In One tribe, whenever the Council/Ruler/King/Shaman subsumes the wisdom of the tribe, everyone complies and acts in the pres...

 I sing the body electric Why Italy's car capital is a signature example on how NOT to manage transport policy and electric cars I never liked committees. I don't like them at work, and most importantly, I like them off work even less. So, when the periodic Condo full assembly is due, I am rarely surprised at announcements about the latest and greatest in Italian Bureaucracy(c). A while back, the hot topic was... Garage regulations. Apparently, in order to mitigate fire hazards, every personal garage owner would have to refurbish his wiring/lightning (easy), install low consumption lights (ok, I can do it myself), install an EXTERNAL breaker (What the heck? What if I put a fridge in and kids cut it off just for giggles?) and..... get a government approved certification through a qualified electrician, 30 pages of gibberish for a paltry 120 EUR (Facepalm). It was not the 250 quid all in that bugged me. It was, as usual, the sheer idiocy of the whole process, because eve...

  Turin, June14th 2021 LEARNING TO LOVE THE BOMB why the West energy policy is a FOREIGN POLICY failure... and Putin is laughing. As much as possible the original source material is included or linked in the article, and this doesn't represent in any shape or form “investment advice” under current EU and/or Italian regulations. Today CNN reported that an EPR III nuclear reactor in China has some problems , of a nature that pushed its original designer and operator, French Framatome , To signal to US authorities its intention to ask for assistance under existing treaties by invoking an “ "imminent radiological threat" , one of the admissible reasons. China has been building up domestic electricity generation in various ways, Coal , Hydro , and Nuclear as well , understandably for an economy at a development stage where Energy intensity of GDP is  still high relative to more mature economies . Of course, a problem in a Nuclear plant design on which France has sta...

Dedicated to my bright and beautiful daughter, who today is celebrating her Birthday 750 km. from home.  Angheria Or why Italians have a tormented view of rule of law...and you would too in their place, or “will”, if your country is sliding in the same direction. ” Angheria” in today's Italian language means “prevarication”, but it was originally a technical term, meaning the days of compulsory labor that farmers had to personally provide to their feudal Lord. It is indeed the name of a form of taxation.   I am a lucky man. I have a family I adore, and a slew of acutely stimulating friends and acquaintances strewn across the world. Yet, “stimulating” means varied, opinions differ, and there are some individuals I value most because, on some issues, we are more unlike than like. But I was strangely put out when a good friend of mine, a person I REALLY look up to, lamented that “after the COVID scare, Italians are reverting to their usual self and disrespecting rules. ...

  Assertions, assumptions and problems behind inheritance taxes Italy has been plagued this week, as it is periodically, with a flurry of proposals to increase/alter inheritance taxes. It's like living in a country plagued with locusts: you can quietly till your land for between three and seven years, then something inexplicable happens and the cloud you see looming in the distance is not a summer thunderstorm, and it buzzes. This time, the starting shot was given by Mr. Letta, the current Secretary of Partito Democratico, ( PD ), who went public saying that he wanted an increase in inheritance taxation in order to finance some kind of handout to young people, like ten thousand EUR per young person. He was promptly stopped By Draghi in a presser, who said, and I quote, “in a recession we give money, we don't take it”. But amazingly, that wouldn't have been enough to have me write down something. What bugged me into writing this was an interview to La Stampa by Vincenzo V...