Category: economic issues

This Is Anfield

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So the infamous board tells the players heading out onto the hallowed turf in L4. And we get to experience our own little bit of Liverpool magic as they head out to Cape Town later this month to play Ajax at the stadium. But – according to this piece in the Guardian from the well-respected David Conn, at least – Liverpool FC is letting down the local community in the search of bigger profits.

In the blighted streets around Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, residents are packing up and leaving their family homes, so the football club can have them demolished and expand their Main Stand. In the six months since the club scrapped their decade-long plan to build a new stadium on Stanley Park, and reverted to expanding Anfield instead, Liverpool city council has been seeking to buy these neighbours’ homes, backed by the legal threat of compulsory purchase.

People’s farewells are bitter, filled with anger and heartbreak at the area’s dreadful decline and at the club for deepening the blight by buying up houses since the mid-1990s then leaving them empty. A few residents are refusing to move, holding out against the council, which begins negotiations with low offers. These homeowners believe they should be paid enough not only to buy a new house but to compensate for the years of dereliction, stagnation and decline, and crime, fires, vandalism, even murders which have despoiled the area. Their resentment is compounded by the fact that they are being forced to move so that Liverpool, and their relatively new US owner, Fenway Sports Group, can make more money.

It’s a complex story of urban decay and degeneration over a number of years, none of which can be directly attributed to Liverpool FC, but there is a wealth of good anecdotal evidence suggesting that the onset of the problems in the Anfield area coincided with the club buying up – and then leaving vacant – housing in the local area.
Between the club, the local council’s compulsory purchase orders and the ruination of the area, residents believe that they are not moving out, they are being driven out.

It’s worth a read.

UPDATE: The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers adds:

I hope this story, if true, gets a lot of attention. Football fans, me included, focus on stupid non-stories, the various handbags-at-dawn things: the ludicrous moral outrage about Luis Suarez biting someone, or players diving, as though those are anywhere near as bad as a potential leg-breaking tackle. But we too often forget or ignore the real stuff, the venality in the game, the immorality of the people who run it.

Yes. What he said.

Constantia Food & Wine Festival

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I’m tired. This afternoon brought with it much activity and when your right leg is incapable of much activity, you take the strain. Thus, I am strained, and was it really worth it?

The Constantia Food and Wine Festival promised much, but delivered little. It was poorly organised, poorly stocked (many places had run out of food by 5pm) and very expensive (R360 for the family to get in). The kids’ section was underwhelming, there were too few toilets and the queues for everything were ridiculous.

Thankfully, the company was good and the wine (and the beer, although Keg King ran out of some of that as well) was excellent. But we soon realised that it was too irritating to have to wait in line for ages just to get 25ml of red in the bottom of your glass, so we bought bottles and avoided the crowds – and the exhibitors. Which isn’t how it should be.

So this one will go down as being remembered for the views, the booze and the queues for the loos.

As a learning experience, it worked. We’ll save our time and money next time around.

Clarification: Mark from Keg King says (via twitter) that he never ran out of beer. But when I went to buy beer from him, I was told of my first two choices (of four on offer): “We don’t have any of that”.
I’m happy to clarify here that they hadn’t sold out of those beers, they just didn’t have any of them.

Disappointing

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Service in South Africa is generally known for all the wrong reasons. And people here are quick to criticise poor service, but slow – despite their obvious amazement – to (publicly, at least) applaud good service. I have, in the past, publicly applauded good service though, and I only mention bad service on here when it’s exceptionally bad and when I’ve tried to sort it out personally and failed.

This week though, has been a revelation as to exactly how bad things can be. And thus, I present to you, a list:

  1. I bought two SA made light bulbs on Saturday. Get them home and discover that only one of them works. The cost of the petrol to get back to the light bulb shop for a replacement means that it’s not worth the trip.
  2. We bought a bedside table for our daughter from a local company. Before we actually gave it to her though, I had to repair it in two places, because it was so poorly made.
  3. Our guttering needs fixing. We contacted three companies to get quotes.
    One didn’t call back at all.
    One finally called back but hasn’t turned up. He hasn’t phoned.
    One promised to come yesterday, but didn’t show. He hasn’t phoned either.
  4. Our gate intercom broke. The gate intercom repairers turned up, “mended it” inside 5 minutes, stuck their company stickers on every electrical item in the entire house and billed us. Except the gate intercom still doesn’t work.
  5. Our recycling company didn’t turn up on Tuesday.
  6. We have three plumbing problems: one I could deal with, but two which are a bit beyond me, so I called a plumber out. He promised to come on Monday. When he still hadn’t showed on Wednesday, I called him. His bakkie broke down over the weekend. He hadn’t bothered to phone.
  7. We ordered food from a new “trendy” delivery service. Online ordering was great, the delivery was prompt, the food was terrible. Sadly, that last bit will stick with us more than the online ordering and delivery.

We’re told that times are hard. We’re told that people and companies need work, but then they treat their customers like this?
Why would I choose to support you in the future when you’ve let me down now?

Yes, guttering people, I know it’s been more than a bit wet this week. Maybe that meant that you had to alter your schedules unexpectedly. But did it really stop your phone working?
Cos mine’s been fine for the last few days. It’s just not been taking any calls from you.

Plumber. Just phone me. I will understand.

Recyclers. And now? Are you going to refund us for your no-show?
Or should we expect you to just turn up when you feel like it now that we’ve paid you in advance?

Bedside table and light bulb manufacturers. Manufacturing bedside tables and light bulbs is your job. Sort it out. Do it well.

Food people. Train your cooks. That was horrible.

I’m understandably disappointed all round.

Still in the dark about Earth Hour?

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Yes yes, I’ve been told that Earth Hour is all about “raising awareness” about “climate change”. I’ve also commented that I really don’t think it’s necessary to raise any more awareness about something we can’t get through a single Pistorius-free day without having rammed down our collective gullet.

In addition, I may also have mentioned that Earth Hour gives slacktivists the perfect opportunity to enjoy their favourite pastime, namely thinking that they’re making a difference without actually making a difference at all. In fact, as that article on Slate pointed out, lighting an inefficient candle (which most bunny-huggers and pseudo bunny-huggers will do this evening) is actually more harmful to our precious environment than using a fat incandescent light bulb for an hour (or, by extrapolation, any given period of time). But how much more harmful?

Well, I’ve found someone who has done some rudimentary calculations to find out exactly how much:

I know candles are nice and romantic – but you’re taking paraffin wax, in the form of a candle, and burning it, very inefficiently, at a low temperature. This stuff is pure hydrocarbon – it’s a heavy alkane fraction distilled straight off crude oil. This stuff is getting so scarce that nations are prepared to go to war just to secure it, remember?

A candle flame burns at a low temperature – so it’s a thermodynamically very inefficient source of energy – and most of the energy released in a candle is wasted as heat, anyway.

Even if 80% of your electricity comes from coal and fossil fuel fired power stations, as it does in Australia, burning candles is very polluting and certainly very greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions intensive, even more so than electric lighting.

Luke Weston then spoon feeds us through his calculations, just so that there can be no confusion as to how he reaches his conclusion. I’m not going to reproduce all those calculations here, but suffice to say that the results (standardised for the amount of light produced – apples with apples and all that) are as follows:

A incandescent bulb produces 1.11g CO2 for each hour that it is burned.
A candle produces 10.69g  for each hour that it is burned.

Therefore, for every candle that is burned to replace electric lighting during Earth Hour, greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the one hour are increased by 9.6 g of carbon dioxide.
If the light output from a 40 W light bulb was to be completely replaced by candles, this will lead to the emission of an extra 295 grams of carbon dioxide per over simply using the electric lights – if the equivalent of one thousand 40 W bulbs are replaced by candles, that’s an extra 295 kilograms of CO2 emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I can feel it getting warmer already.

Thus, if you really want to “make a difference” this evening (a positive difference, that is), you’ll be far better off sitting in the dark for an hour. And, if you want to DOUBLE the your contribution to saving the planet, you could do it for two.

But then we have to remember that there’s football and rugby in Cape Town tonight which you’ll want to watch on your dirty, still not ever so energy efficient flatscreen TV, dwarfing any potential benefits of switching off your lights and (not) firing up a candle.

Fortunately, this darkness and/or watching sport will (possibly) restrict the amount of “other activities” that some people have been suggesting might be an enjoyable and romantic by-product of an environment-destroying candlelit evening. I say “fortunately” because my wife is away this evening because each baby produced from those “other activities” will add so much to your household carbon footprint that you might as well stop washing out those Marmite jars and begin weeping right now:

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

So. Please spend your Earth Hour in the dark. No lights, no candles, certainly no TV and ABSOLUTELY NO HANKY PANKY!

And even then, please don’t pretend that you’re actually making a difference.

Own goal

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If this interpretation of the new Cape Town Liquor By-law is accurate – and there’s no suggestion that it isn’t – then it’s an absolutely massive own goal by our supposedly liberal DA city council.

  • No alcohol can be sold for off-consumption on Sundays, except for wineries.
  • No alcohol can be sold for off-consumption after 6pm on weekdays.
  • No sale of more than 150 litres of alcohol to any one person unless they have a liquor licence or special permission from the Chairman of the Liquor Board.
  • No-one may keep more than 150 litres of wine in their home without a liquor licence.
  • No drinking alcohol in vehicles.
  • No drinking at school functions ever. This applies even if the function is held away from school grounds and on a licenced premises.

For starters, I do agree with the no drinking in vehicles and the school function thing makes some degree of sense on a basic level. But that’s where my support for this ends.

There’s absolutely no question that Cape Town – as with the rest of South Africa – has a huge problem with alcohol. But I fail to see how this new bylaw will help to solve that. Illegal shebeens currently operate with impunity across the city; why will this bylaw prevent them from continuing to do so, with such limited enforcement of the laws that already exist?

The nod to Sundays as being somehow special is backward and unnecessary. Again, exactly how that assists with reducing alcohol abuse is beyond me. Or are we planning on baby steps here – to reduce problem drinking by 1/7th? Is that enough?

And then the whole 150 litres issues. No buying for big parties and even if you could, no taking it home. No wine collections of over 200 bottles – if you have one, you will be breaking the law in a couple of weeks. Are they really going to do dawn raids on posh houses that they suspect may have a wine cellar? It’s pathetic.

And this is just on off sales. The implications for restaurants and bars – and with them, Cape Town’s vital tourist industry – are even more worrying.

I have nothing but contempt for these new regulations. They are short sighted and unhelpful and they risk alienating a huge proportion of the voting public. Without proper enforcement, any law is useless anyway and as we’ve point out with the traffic, there really is no enforcement of our laws here. So what’s the point?

The one thing with our city council is that they do have a history of actually listening to public opinion, so maybe there is some hope that the outcry that this stupid bylaw generates will result in it being changed to something more sensible in the future.
But in the meantime, on the 1st April, we in Cape Town will be living in a beautiful, but backward city. And that’s very sad.