Global Thoughts — 13 May 2013 including notes from Berkshire Hathaway meeting in Omaha & Travel to Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina

 

 

 

 

IMG_4351Ever hear of Dav Pilkey? He’s the author of the children’s series of books called “Captain Underpants”. He’s perfected the art of coming up with great titles and book covers such as Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets or — get this — Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies From Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds). I think he must sit there with a list of words and choose from them each time he comes out with a new book. I just read 150 pages of this book this afternoon to Jeremy and he could have sat through another 150 pages if I would have read it to him!

As you can see, our kids are enjoying karate. They also both take gymnastics after school. And Elizabeth does cooking class, while Jeremy goes to Crazy Construction (where they build stuff). I asked them if they’d rather live in the suburbs and play in the backyard or if they think it is more fun to live in the City — they said they like the city. But as you’ll see below, we get out.

This year for Passover we went on one of those Passover programs for 3 days to sample what it is like. These programs are in hotels and are designed to allow Jews to not have to clean their homes for Passover and deal with Passover food. It has become a very large industry and they charge a lot of money for these programs. To justify the price, they feed people every meal as if it were their last one and it borders on obscene (although our kids were very happy to ignore all of the lunch buffet and just go to the gelato cart in the back of the dining room). If lunch at 1pm wasn’t good enough, then there is a BBQ at 4pm, followed by dinner at 7pm and a huge dessert buffet at 10pm – one just flows into the other; people were bringing in plates of waffles into the dining room while others around them were still downing steaks and lamb chops. After about 24 hours of this, I’d had enough; if you can imagine people do this for 10 days. For us, Passover is not so intimidating because if you don’t eat a lot of processed foods or bread, you can do fine eating fruits, vegetables, fish, chicken and beef without ever having to know it’s Passover. And we have a box of kitchen utensils from the 99 cent store that we can bring out in order to make our kitchen kosher for passover, and use disposable goods for eating. But the kids loved the day camp and it gave us a few hours off each day to sit at the pool and relax. To that degree, the program was worth it. Passover is one of the few holidays each year where the kids are off from school and the parents can’t show up to work for a good number of days, so it just makes sense for Jews to plan holiday trips around Passover. This program was at the Boca Raton Hotel and Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida. The hotel is fine, but if you weren’t there for a program, it would be pretty boring with the kids as there is not much to do there besides go to the pool. When it gets busy, people put down their towels on the chaise lounges at 7am and take away all the spaces. There is a beach club which is a 15 minute ride away from this hotel but it is really busy out there and not a place to relax by a long shot. And just try to get on the shuttle back to the main hotel at 5pm.

IMG_4237After Passover we wanted to do something totally anti-Passover so we went to the Palmetto Bluff Inn at Bluffton, South Carolina. It is a 45 minute drive from Hilton Head airport or Savannah, Georgia, or almost 2 hours drive from Charleston, South Carolina. This resort is in the flat marshland area near the ocean and offers beautiful nature such as pretty trees and water views. We stayed in a house which came with a golf cart and bicycles, and we bought some scooters at a local Target store. The kids had a great time driving down the streets and paths in the small village and playing in the parks that featured a zip line and some tall tree houses. The resort offers a 45 minute boat ride down the river to see wildlife and the vegetation. There was also a Paint the Pony activity where you go on a pony ride and then return to the barn to paint and then shampoo the pony. We visited the Old Railroad Museum in Savannah, and took a trolley tour of the historical district in Savannah which is very quaint. That city is one you want to walk around rather than see on a trolley and it has a very tourist-trap feeling during the day at peak travel times (such as Fridays in the spring). Our kids had a great time here and we had the experience of chasing them around the resort on the golf cart as they rode their bicycles and didn’t worry about being hit by cars. This is a place you want to go when the weather is nice; it was a bit cool in the beginning of April but by June it gets really hot and muggy, and the mozzies come out and bite. If you visit, have dinner at Pour Richards in Bluffton; the home-made desserts are excellent.

A week ago Saturday I was in synagogue talking to a friend who walks about 20 blocks from his apartment to get to services. A few days later I got an email from the synagogue saying he had died from a heart attack. I went to his funeral (something I rarely do) because I would enjoy talking to him when I saw him and was curious to know more about him because he was a very interesting and educated character who gave community lectures and who seemed to know a lot about everything. He was also a very genuine person and the two of us used to joke about how there is not much of those kinds of people where we live and go to synagogue. He had been born in Tennessee, so NYC was not his home town. Lots of people showed up wondering the same thing and the eulogies were laced with a good amount of humor that were appropriate considering the person. One unfortunate thing about dying suddenly is the inability to close the conversation and say a proper goodbye. Think about that next time you see someone in your community.

Off to the world at large.

Things are looking up — I just saw a report that says that Greece’s economy might begin recovering next year.

Consider that today in India more people have access to mobile telephones than working toilets.

Certain things are going on in the background. China’s Bank of China stopped working with a major North Korean bank under pressure from the US Treasury. Israel suspended settlement building. Despite this, the Dry Bones cartoonist from Israel, who is generally a hawk, published a cartoon this week praising Obama II as opposed to Obama I. Kerry is managing to get a conference in with the Russians to try and solve the problem in Syria, and I would assume they wouldn’t stage the conference to have everyone walk out embarrassed with no ideas although I really expect nothing to come of it.

Israel has been trying for years to get the West to label Hizbullah as a terrorist organization. Bahrain this month labeled Hizbullah a terrorist organization. Any takers in Europe?

Boston Bombing – I thought the thermal image of the guy hiding in the boat taken from a helicopter was really cool. They could even see when he sat up. How many people thought the police could do that? Too bad nobody could see those 3 girls holed up in that house in Cleveland for 10 years.

US Budget Sequestration – Also Amazing is how Congress passed a law to solve the air traffic control problem the day they all had to fly home for a recess; the irony was that the overtime being paid out to the people still working made up for the savings by the furloughed controllers.

This month the Economist had a survey about the future of the Automobile. This will be the next big revolution when cars become self-driving, especially since insurance companies already think that they are and will be safer than cars being driven by people. Kids will go to school in them. No more taxis as we know it, but a driverless taxi, especially in cities, would be awesome. Why would you need to have your own car if you knew you could have easy access to a car that could just take you where you want to go. For longer hauls, you could still rent a car.

I read a nice article about Delta airlines lately and I’m planning to buy some of their stock. We are down to 3 real airlines in the US — American, United and Delta, and Delta is the airline I dislike the least of the 3 and it seems to have the happiest employees of the 3 companies. (The airline I really like is JetBlue but it is a bit player in this industry.) The airlines will probably make money now that they pretty much have 90% of the field to themselves. Delta also bought an oil refinery which is a good hedge against the price of oil, except if the price goes down a lot. But then they could probably sell the refinery. I remember when I was a kid and I would walk from one end of the Miami airport to the other and collect all the timetables — you’d have a stack of 50 of them by the time you got to the end. Now probably nobody in this country even publishes paper timetables.

Don’t you get a certain pleasure when you read on one hand that the finance minister of France states he wants to tax the rich 75% of their income and then find out that the finance minister has lied about secret offshore bank accounts he has to avoid the tax.

While nobody was looking, it emerged that out of the 22,000 unsold condominiums in Miami at the height of the last real estate bust, now only 600 remain unsold. So what are they now doing in Miami? Building more condos.

I know that Syria looks like a mess that people feel the US should get involved in, but I think that Obama is rightfully very wary of who our allies would be, and that it would be best to just stay out of it. Perhaps give some help from the sidelines and hope for the best, but that’s about it. All those people who are saying “get in there and do something” will a year from now be calling the US “interventionist imperialists” whenever anyone who got US aid does something they don’t like and it is a sure thing that the aid the US gives will come back to bite it later. No matter what, the outcome in that theater will not be good. I take the recent Israeli air strikes against Syria as something outsourced by the US; Obama doesn’t know what to do with his earlier statement that chemical weapon use by the Syrians would be a “game changer” so if the Israelis help deal with the Assad regime, it takes the heat off him.

Just came back from the annual Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s the conglomerate of companies owned by Warren Buffett, one of the top two wealthiest people in America. It’s him and Bill Gates at the top. This annual event now seats about 35,000 people in the city’s convention center. Mr. Buffett, who is in his 80’s, sits at a table for about 5 hours with his sidekick Charlie Munger who is close to 90, and the two of them answer questions from panelists and shareholders. The answers are very plain spoken and spiced with humor. It is pretty amazing to watch them endure this event (they seem to enjoy it but I found it rather long and tedious, especially without a bathroom break for up to 3 hours at a time). I did it once, but I wouldn’t go again. But lots of people come every year and there were fathers and sons in the audience and others having family reunions built around the event. People don’t expect this kind of show to keep going on after Mr. Buffett dies and who knows how long that will be from now.

The day starts off with a 45 minute video including hokey sketches with Warren in them. There is an exhibit hall with various companies owned wholly or in part by Berkshire Hathaway showing their wares and selling goods and lots of people come there just to shop. Did you know that Berkshire owns 9% of Coca Cola or about 15% of American Express, for example. Most of the people I met there were working (ie: fund managers wanting to hear Buffett talk about their industry); not as many shareholders just come because they are shareholders. Interesting things I heard either of the two men say: “I’ve never done well at anything I didn’t really like doing.” “In Italy – when they have too much mail at the post office, they just throw a bunch of it out.” “They found a lot of oil near the railroad tracks we own, so our railroad division will do well this year moving a lot of oil around.” Both Warren and Charlie agreed with what Washington has done over the past 4-5 years in terms of its general economic policy (ie: stimulus to the economy; low interest rates). “This is a country of 310 million people – Washington can’t really do anything to ruin it.”

There was a display from NetJets – one of their companies that deals with private planes. It was fun to look inside the planes but I frankly wouldn’t want one – they are just too low in the ceiling and expensive to use; it would cost about 10x more to use a private plane to go from New York to Virginia; it would cost tons more if you were flying coast to coast. Omaha is a 3 hour flight from New York; the airlines added extra flights that weekend and charged people a lot for the tickets. My wife’s platinum status with United got me free tickets on the nonstop flights I wanted and I only had to pay 50,000 points through her account instead of 100,000 points on connecting flights on my account, so that was a real benefit.

Omaha doesn’t get a lot of sun, and we got none of it while I was there for 48 hours. The Chamber of Commerce was the only one sweating through the weekend. It was much colder than usual; it had just snowed there the first of May. Downtown is pretty boring to look at but there are some nice pockets such as Old Town and some really nice museums. I saw the Durham Museum, which was a world-class historical museum in the old restored train station. Several people in Omaha made fortunes and put money into the city and there are some nice buildings and corporate headquarters there. I stayed at the Hotel Magnolia, a nice boutique hotel that offered good value in the center of the city.

This is my favourite time of the year — in the fall, you get the colors but you know the leaves will die. In the spring, it all starts very slowly and builds up and you don’t know at the beginning how green the trees will become. All that potential to look forward to. Enjoy your season. I have some interesting activities scheduled for the next month including a visit to Scotland, and the motor speedway in Charlotte, North Carolina with my Top-Gear fanatic son. Stay tuned.

Share:

Share This Post

Most Recent Posts

Archives
Get The Latest Updates

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

No spam, notifications only about new posts.

Read More

Related Posts

Global Thoughts — 20 December 2023

Karen and I shared a salad for our 20th anniversary lunch out. 20 years ago it would have been lots of food and desert. In 30 years will we be sharing our dentures for lunch? I would like to dare

Act II for the Jewish State — 19 December 2023

After 75 years, Israel as an enterprise is not succeeding as it should. Jews should cut their losses in the Middle East and reboot the Jewish State elsewhere, focusing on building excellence instead of simply trying to survive. Thomas Friedman’s

Scroll to Top