Container Rates Up; Rich Countries and Rich People; Africa; Old People and a Dramatic Death
February 12, 2024 Volume 4 # 39
Freight Rates Soar: Prices will Be Next
Rack em and Stack em
Because container ships are avoiding the Red Sea and there are restrictions on the Panama Canal, the price of shipping a container from China, Vietnam and other spots to ports such as Los Angeles, and I assume Vancouver, has tripled. You have to think those costs will be passed on and means inflation is not going away anytime soon.
Zuckerberg Launches Into # 4 On Forbes Rich List.
That annoying little twerp Mark Zuckerberg made $28-billion the day after he was humiliated in the show trial in the US Senate. Iceland’s annual GDP is about $28-billion, though that is an iffy comparison. The reason: Meta, the corporate name for Facebook, started paying a dividend, among other things. It was just five cents a share but it probably means some pension funds can own it if they have a dividend rule.
Here are the top five richest people after markets closed on Friday.
Rich Countries
There isn’t anyone on the list from Luxembourg but it is listed as the richest country per person. Look down that list and there are a lot of rich countries where you might not want to live. Qatar would be pretty boring after a while. Bermuda is so small you might go stir crazy. There is a reason Russian thieves like London, Paris and New York. They are fun with rules so people can’t steal your money, unless of course the biggest thief of them all decides to invade Ukraine. Then you’re stuck with Qatar.
Richest Rulers
The Grand Duke of Luxembourg is pulling up the Stats for his country. It’s doubtful that the various kings and emirs could make off with the cash. For some reason King Charles III didn’t make the cut. He certainly has more caché than these boys.
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Africa is Bigger than It Looks on the Map
There is probably no place in the world that has as much potential as Africa, from copper to hydro power to oil and more. This map shows just how big it is..
African Growth
It is inevitable that African economies will grow. It might not be in the places that are now more prosperous, such as South Africa and Nigeria— both terribly corrupt.
Super Bowl Spending.
The average household in the United States spends $86.04 on Super Bowl Sunday. That is down from $100 pre Covid. That doesn't count gambling. Americans bet an estimated $23-billion on the Super Bowl outcome. That is another $182 per household.
The Oldest People in the World
Here it pays to live in rich countries or countries such as Brazil that are rich in places. The surprise may be there are three Americans on this list and not more Japanese.
Only one is a man, not uncommon as I discovered.
A man who was the oldest in Canada
In 2016 I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail about a man who was 110. At the time he was the oldest man in Canada; three women were also super-centenarians, as those who make it to 110 are called. Here is that story:
Zoltan Sarosy, was just two months’ shy of his eighth birthday when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting in motion the crisis that led to the First World War. The young Hungarian boy was living close by in a military base where his father was a doctor in the army.
“My mother came in and said we have to leave within 12 hours. A torpedo boat took us to a port in Herzegovina and then we took an ocean liner to Trieste and travelled by train to Budapest,” said Mr. Sarosy, sitting in his wheelchair at the lounge a senior’s home on Bloor Street West, across from High Park.
As of his birthday on August 23 he will probably be the oldest man in Canada—Statistics Canada doesn’t keep individual records, but an online website that does says there are three people older than Mr. Sarosy, all of them women.
Stascan does say there are more Canadians than ever living to 100 and more, 5,825 in the 2011 census, and only 955 of them are men. Life expectancy is growing so fast that by 2031, Statscan predicts there will be 17,000 Canadians 100 years old or more.
Even then few of Zoltan of them will live to be supercentrains, the name for people who make to 110.
Zoltan Sarosy was born in 1906 in Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That empire was a kind of multi-cultural common market. It was backwards in places, but more tolerant than anything that followed it. Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Jews and Muslims all left each other pretty much alone. Polyglot does not even begin to do justice to a vast domain whose people spoke at least thirteen languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Croatian, Slovak, Serbian, Slovenian, Russian, Italian and Yiddish.
Young Zoltan was fluent in Hungarian and German, a skill that probably saved his life in the Second World War. He was a translator when other Hugarian men his age were drafted and sent to the Eastern Front.
“He remembers the past but what amazes me in his short-term memory,” says Elena Yeryomenko, who is his caregiver at the Grenadier sernior’s home on Bloor Street west.
Zoltan died 110 years and 300 days.
Essay of the Week
For a man who wrote and spoke so much about death, Robert Buckman’s own death was rather dramatic, something he might have scripted into one of his health videos. He died quietly in Seat 8A in business class on the Air Canada flight 859 from London. He was 63.
Robert Buckman was a cancer specialist, TV personality and media and scientific polymath. He wrote fourteen books dealing with cancer, health and death and hundreds of articles on similar subjects. In the Videos for Patients series he co-starred in 45 episodes with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame. Just before he died he had completed a series on medical education called Top Ten Tips, which he made with Terry Jones, another former Python man.
All of Dr. Buckman’s writings and TV performances were injected with a cheeky British sense of humour. He knew that medicine, in particular cancer medicine, scares the daylights out of patients and there is a somber seriousness to things that he wanted to change.
Though he could appear at first glance as the medical version of an English music hall comedian, Dr. Buckman was in reality a serious research scientist and practicing oncologist who saw his mission in life as making medicine easy to digest. Not only was he was medical doctor, a specialist in both internal medicine and cancer and he was a PhD and a professor of medical oncology at the University of Toronto. He was still publishing papers, and was researching the effects of low-level chemotherapy at the time of his death.
“The idea behind low level chemotherapy was that the lower dose was easier on the patient,” said his wife, Patricia Shaw, who is also a pathologist and medical researcher. “He was a sincere, caring person.”
Robert Alexander Amiel Buckman was born in London in August of 1948 into an accomplished family. His third name is a reference to his mother’s family and his first cousin is Barbara Amiel, the journalist.
“His family were all serious intellectuals who were also very funny,” Dr Shaw.
Along with being a brilliant student he was on the stage early in life. He was the Midshipman in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore while he was still in the Canadian equivalent of high school. It wasn’t an amateur production but a professional performance at the Savoy Theater in London’s West End.
While at Cambridge University he performed in Footlights, the famous theatrical troupe that spawned so many of Britain’s comedians. While he was a medical resident he teamed up with a fellow medical student, Chris Beetles and they formed a partnership doing standup comedy and eventually writing and performing in a TV sitcom called The Pink Medicine Show.
The serious side of Rob Buckman won out over the theatrical side and he continued to study medicine, finally deciding to specialize in cancer.
"I became interested in cancer medicine in 1975. After completing my specialist training in internal medicine, I went to the Royal Marsden Hospital, where I trained in cancer medicine, including laboratory research leading to a doctorate,” wrote Dr. Buckman several years ago.
It was around that time that Dr. Buckman started to link his theatrical ability with his medical knowledge. He appeared in a series of science programs on Yorkshire Television in Britain. By 1981 he was the co-host of a medical program called Where There’s Life. In the mid 80’s he came to Canada for a short trip and stayed.
“He made up his mind right away and wrote out his CV by hand,” said Dr. Shaw. “He was impressed by the Canadian medical system, especially what was being done with oncology in Toronto compared to Britain.”
Dr. Buckman worked as an oncologist at the Bayview Regional Cancer Center seeing patients and working as a medical researcher. A sensitive man in spite of his jocular exterior, he saw the heartbreak of cancer patients hearing the news they were going to die. It was hard on the patient, the family and the doctor.
"In the last few years, in my hospital and teaching practice, I have concentrated on various aspects of the doctor-patient relationship, particularly with respect to breaking bad news and providing supportive care for the dying and their families,” said Dr. Buckman in an interview.
One video series he produced was called `Why Won't They Talk to me?'. It was aimed at medical students and others who had to communicate bad news. He also wrote a book for the relatives and friends of someone who is dying called `I Don't Know What to Say’. Most of the titles of his books and programs told you in one line what you were going to read or hear, such as `Cancer is A Word, Not a Sentence’.
He would fly anywhere for medical conferences, and he was in demand as the opening speaker since he had the rare combination of knowledge and the ability to entertain. For many years he flew to Houston, Texas, where he was an adjunct professor of neuro-oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Clinic, ranked as the number one cancer treatment center in the United States.
For the past eight years he has worked and done research at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto where he was attached to the Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research.
Dr. Buckman’s main hobby was reading: fiction, history medicine. He loved books and had a collection of antiquarian books. One of his favourites was an edition of Dante’s Inferno illustrated by Gustav Dore. He also started an all men’s book club that included bankers, doctors and radio hosts, including Andy Barrie the retired CBC broadcaster.
“Much more than a fellow male book clubber, Rob and I were among each others' very best friends ever since we met almost twenty-five years ago,” said Mr. Barrie from his farm north of Toronto. “The man was so brilliantly wonderful at so many things - from being hysterically funny in telling a story to being stunningly supportive in guiding the confused and fearful through the labyrinth called cancer.”
“He had an extraordinary brain and knew so much about a wide range of topics because he was so well read. His retention was remarkable,” said Tom Healy, a retired banker, long time friend and onetime member of the book club. “He had a wide range of friends from all walks of life. Many of his friends, including me, urged him to slow down. But he packed two lives into one.”
In one of his books, Dr. Buckman wrote about his own funeral.
“They’re going to play a recording of me saying `Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have to get up in the morning’.”
He is survived by his wife Pat and their two children as well as two children from an earlier marriage.