Tamil women soldiers recruited to Sri Lankan Army

A batch of 95 Tamil women soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army held their passing out parade at the security force's headquarters in the former LTTE stronghold of Kilinochchi in the north.        

This was the first time the army saw such a large group of Tamil women joining the organisation en bloc, although the army has had a fair number of Tamil woman officers serving it ever since its founding, military officials said.

rediff

Diamonds Are A Sham And It's Time We Stop Getting Engaged With Them

Yeah, they say three years’ salary.” -- Michael Scott, The Office

American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage - they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock.

They could invest the money in assets that will compound over time and someday provide a nest egg.

Instead, they trade that money for a diamond ring, which isn’t much of an asset at all. As soon as you leave the jeweler with a diamond, it loses over 50% of its value. 

Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. 

Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.

Countless American dudes will attest that the societal obligation to furnish a diamond engagement ring is both stressful and expensive. But here’s the thing - this obligation only exists because the company that stands to profit from it willed it into existence.  

So here is a modest proposal: Let’s agree that diamonds are bullshit and reject their role in the marriage process. Let’s admit that as a society we got tricked for about century into coveting sparkling pieces of carbon, but it’s time to end the nonsense.

The Concept of Intrinsic Value

In finance, there is concept called intrinsic value. An asset’s value is essentially driven by the (discounted) value of the future cash that asset will generate. For example, when Hertz buys a car, its value is the profit they get from renting it out and selling the car at the end of its life (the “terminal value”). For Hertz, a car is an investment. When you buy a car, unless you make money from it somehow, its value corresponds to its resale value. Since a car is a depreciating asset, the amount of value that the car loses over its lifetime is a very real expense you pay.

A diamond is a depreciating asset masquerading as an investment. There is a common misconception that jewelry and precious metals are assets that can store value, appreciate, and hedge against inflation. That’s not wholly untrue.

Gold and silver are commodities that can be purchased on financial markets. They can appreciate and hold value in times of inflation. You can even hoard gold under your bed and buy gold coins and bullion (albeit at a ~10% premium to market rates). If you want to hoard gold jewelry however, there is  typically a 100-400% retail markup so that’s probably not a wise investment. 

But with that caveat in mind, the market for gold is fairly liquid and gold is fungible - you can trade one large piece of gold for ten smalls ones like you can a ten dollar bill for a ten one dollar bills. These characteristics make it a feasible potential investment.

Diamonds, however, are not an investment. The market for them is neither liquid nor are they fungible.

The first test of a liquid market is whether you can resell a diamond. In a famous piece published by The Atlantic in 1982, Edward Epstein explains why you can’t sell used diamonds for anything but a pittance:

Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be considered ridiculously low. The “keystone,” or markup, on a diamond and its setting may range from 100 to 200 percent, depending on the policy of the store; if it bought diamonds back from customers, it would have to buy them back at wholesale prices. 

…

Most jewelers would prefer not to make a customer an offer that might be deemed insulting and also might undercut the widely held notion that diamonds go up in value. Moreover, since retailers generally receive their diamonds from wholesalers on consignment, and need not pay for them until they are sold, they would not readily risk their own cash to buy diamonds from customers.

When you buy a diamond, you buy it at retail, which is a 100% to 200% markup. If you want to resell it, you have to pay less than wholesale to incent a diamond buyer to risk their own capital on the purchase. Given the large markup, this will mean a substantial loss on your part. The same article puts some numbers around the dilemma:

Because of the steep markup on diamonds, individuals who buy retail and in effect sell wholesale often suffer enormous losses. For example, Brod estimates that a half-carat diamond ring, which might cost $2,000 at a retail jewelry store, could be sold for only $600 at Empire.

Some diamonds are perhaps investment grade, but you probably don’t own one, even if you spent a lot.

The appraisers at Empire Diamonds examine thousands of diamonds a month but rarely turn up a diamond of extraordinary quality. Almost all the diamonds they find are slightly flawed, off-color, commercial-grade diamonds. The chief appraiser says, “When most of these diamonds were purchased, American women were concerned with the size of the diamond, not its intrinsic quality.” He points out that the setting frequently conceals flaws, and adds, “The sort of flawless, investment-grade diamond one reads about is almost never found in jewelry.”

As with televisions and mattresses, the diamond classification scheme is extremely complicated. Diamonds are not fungible and can’t be easily exchanged with each other. Diamond professionals use the 4 C’s when classifying and pricing diamonds: carats, color, cut, and clarity. Due to the complexity of these 4 dimensions, it’s hard to make apples to apples comparisons between diamonds.

But even when looking at the value of one stone, professionals seem like they’re just making up diamond prices:

In 1977, for example, Jewelers’ Circular Keystone polled a large number of retail dealers and found a difference of over 100 percent in offers for the same quality of investment-grade diamonds.

So let’s be very clear, a diamond is not an investment. You might want one because it looks pretty or its status symbol to have a “massive rock”, but not because it will store value or appreciate in value.

But among all the pretty, shiny things out there - gold and silver, rubies and emeralds - why do Americans covet diamond engagement rings in the first place?

A Diamond is Forever a Measure of your Manhood

“The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.” -- Don Draper, Madmen

We like diamonds because Gerold M. Lauck told us to. Until the mid 20th century, diamond engagement rings were a small and dying industry in America. Nor had the concept really taken hold in Europe. Moreover, with Europe on the verge of war, it didn’t seem like a promising place to invest. 

Not surprisingly, the American market for diamond engagement rings began to shrink during the Great Depression. Sales volume declined and the buyers that remained purchased increasingly smaller stones. But the US market for engagement rings was still 75% of De Beers’ sales. If De Beers was going to grow, it had to reverse the trend.

And so, in 1938, De Beers turned to Madison Avenue for help. They hired Gerold Lauck and the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, who commissioned a study with some astute observations. Men were the key to the market:

Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

However, there was a dilemma. Many smart and prosperous women didn’t want diamond engagement rings. They wanted to be different.

The millions of brides and brides-to-be are subjected to at least two important pressures that work against the diamond engagement ring. Among the more prosperous, there is the sophisticated urge to be different as a means of being smart…. the lower-income groups would like to show more for the money than they can find in the diamond they can afford…

Lauck needed to sell a product that people either did not want or could not afford. His solution would haunt men for generations. He advised that De Beers market diamonds as a status symbol:

"The substantial diamond gift can be made a more widely sought symbol of personal and family success — an expression of socio-economic achievement.”

…

“Promote the diamond as one material object which can reflect, in a very personal way, a man’s … success in life.”

The next time you look at a diamond, consider this. Nearly every American marriage begins with a diamond because a bunch of rich white men in the 1940s convinced everyone that its size determines your self worth. They created this convention - that unless a man purchases (an intrinsically useless) diamond, his life is a failure - while sitting in a room, racking their brains on how to sell diamonds that no one wanted. 

With this insight, they began marketing diamonds as a symbol of status and love:Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. 

Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the “trend towards diamonds” that Ayer planned to start. The Ayer plan also envisioned using the British royal family to help foster the romantic allure of diamonds. 

Even the royal family was in on the hoax! The campaign paid immediate dividends. Within 3 years, despite the Great Depression, diamond sales in the US increased 55%! Twenty years later, an entire generation believed that an expensive diamond ring was a necessary step in the marriage process. 

The De Beers marketing machine continued to churn out the hits. They circulated marketing materials suggesting, apropos of nothing, that a man should spend one month’s salary on a diamond ring. It worked so well that De Beers arbitrarily decided to increase the suggestion to two months salary. That’s why you think that you need to spend two month’s salary on a ring - because the suppliers of the product said so.

Today, over 80% of women in the US receive diamond rings when they get engaged. The domination is complete.

A History of Market Manipulation

What, you might ask, could top institutionalizing demand for a useless product out of thin air? Monopolizing the supply of diamonds for over a century to make that useless product extremely expensive. You see, diamonds aren’t really even that rare.

Before 1870, diamonds were very rare. They typically ended up in a Maharaja’s crown or a royal necklace. In 1870, enormous deposits of diamonds were discovered in Kimberley, South Africa. As diamonds flooded the market, the financiers of the mines realized they were making their own investments worthless. As they mined more and more diamonds, they became less scarce and their price dropped.

The diamond market may have bottomed out were it not for an enterprising individual by the name of Cecil Rhodes. He began buying up mines in order to control the output and keep the price of diamonds high. By 1888, Rhodes controlled the entire South African diamond supply, and in turn, essentially the entire world supply. One of the companies he acquired was eponymously named after its founders, the De Beers brothers.

Building a diamond monopoly isn’t easy work. It requires a balance of ruthlessly punishing and cooperating with competitors, as well as a very long term view. For example, in 1902, prospectors discovered a massive mine in South Africa that contained as many diamonds as all of De Beers’ mines combined. The owners initially refused to join the De Beers cartel, joining three years later after new owner Ernest Oppenheimer recognized that a competitive market for diamonds would be disastrous for the industry:

Common sense tells us that the only way to increase the value of diamonds is to make them scarce, that is to reduce production.

Here’s how De Beers has controlled the diamond supply chain for most of the last century. De Beers owns most of the diamond mines. For mines that they don’t own, they have historically bought out all the diamonds, intimidating or co-opting any that think of resisting their monopoly. They then transfer all the diamonds over to the Central Selling Organization (CSO), which they own. 

The CSO sorts through the diamonds, puts them in boxes and presents them to the 250 partners that they sell to. The price of the diamonds and quantity of diamonds are non-negotiable - it’s take it or leave it. Refuse your boxes and you’re out of the diamond industry.

For most of the 20th century, this system has controlled 90% of the diamond trade and been solely responsible for the inflated price of diamonds. However, as Oppenheimer took over leadership at De Beers, he keenly assessed the primary operational risk that the company faced:

Our only risk is the sudden discovery of new mines, which human nature will work recklessly to the detriment of us all.

Because diamonds are “valuable”, there will always be the risk of entrepreneurs finding new sources of diamonds. Although controlling the discoverers of new mines often actually meant working with communists. In 1957, the Soviet Union discovered a massive deposit of diamonds in Siberia. Though the diamonds were a bit on the smallish side, De Beers still had to swoop in and buy all of them from the Soviets, lest they risk the supply being unleashed on the world market.

Later, in Australia, a large supply of colored diamonds was discovered. When the mine refused to join the syndicate, De Beers retaliated by unloading massive amounts of colored diamonds that were similar to the Australian ones to drive down their price. Similarly, in the 1970s, some Israeli members of the CSO started stockpiling the diamonds they were allocated rather than reselling them. This made it difficult for De Beers to control the market price and would eventually cause a deflation in diamond prices when the hoarders released their stockpile. Eventually, these offending members were banned from the CSO, essentially shutting them out from the diamond business.

In 2000, De Beers announced that they were relinquishing their monopoly on the diamond business. They even settled a US Antitrust lawsuit related to price fixing industrial diamonds to the tune of $10 million (How generous! What is that, the price of one investment banker’s engagement ring?). 

Today, De Beers hold on the industry supply chain is less strong. And yet, price continue to rise as new deposits haven’t been found recently and demand for diamonds is increasing in India and China. For now, it’s less necessary that the company monopolize the supply chain because its lie that a diamond is a proxy for a man’s worth in life has infected the rest of the world.

Conclusion

“I didn’t get a bathroom door that looks like a wall by being bad at business” -- Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

We covet diamonds in America for a simple reason: the company that stands to profit from diamond sales decided that we should. De Beers’ marketing campaign single handedly made diamond rings the measure of one’s success in America. Despite its complete lack of inherent value, the company manufactured an image of diamonds as a status symbol. And to keep the price of diamonds high, despite the abundance of new diamond finds, De Beers executed the most effective monopoly of the 20th century. Okay, we get it De Beers, you guys are really good at business! 

The purpose of this post was to point out that diamond engagement rings are a lie - they’re an invention of Madison Avenue and De Beers. This post has completely glossed over the sheer amount of human suffering that we’ve caused by believing this lie: conflict diamonds funding wars, supporting apartheid for decades with our money, and pillaging the earth to find shiny carbon. And while we’re on the subject, why is it that women need to be asked and presented with a ring in order to get married? Why can’t they ask and do the presenting?

Diamonds are not actually scarce, make a terrible investment, and are purely valuable as a status symbol.

Diamonds, to put it delicately, are bullshit.

This post was written by Rohin Dhar. He has a very patient wife. Follow him on Twitter here or Google.

businessinsider

Why Cyprus is facing a grave economic crisis

Cyprus has escaped from the verge of bankruptcy. The collapse of Cyprus's banking system has been averted as European Union leaders on Monday agreed on a bailout package to keep Cyprus in the euro zone.

Cyprus will receive the first installment of the bailout package worth $13 billion in early May. Banks in Cyprus have been closed for more than a week and restrictions have been imposed on ATM withdrawal limit.

Click NEXT to read more...

Once a high-income economy, Cyprus has been facing a severe economic crisis. 

Hit by the Eurozone financial and banking crisis, in June 2012, the Cypriot government announced it would need 1.8 billion euros of foreign aid to support the Cyprus Popular Bank.

This was followed by Fitch down-grading Cypus's credit rating to junk status.

Fitch said Cyprus would need an additional 4 billion euros to support its banks and the downgrade was mainly due to the exposure of Bank of Cyprus, Cyprus Popular Bank and Hellenic Bank (Cyprus's 3 largest banks) to the Greek financial crisis.

Cyprus has been sought as a base for several offshore businesses for its highly developed infrastructure. Tourism, financial services, and shipping are money spinners for the economy.

Despite its low population and small size, Cyprus has a large off-shore banking industry.

With a total nominal GDP of $24 billion the country was unable to stabilise its banks, which had amassed 22 billion euros of Greek private sector debt.

The announcement that Cyprus would impose a tax on bank accounts as part of a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) bailout broke with previous practice that depositors' savings were sacrosanct and sent a shiver across the bloc, causing the euro to tumble and stock markets to dive last week.

Locals sit at a kebab restaurant in central Nicosia.

A man walks in front of shops in central Nicosia.

Two girls talk sitting at the Venetian Walls surrounding the old town of capital Nicosia.

Click NEXT to read more...

Workers are seen on a construction site in central Nicosia.

A girl waits at a bus station in Nicosia.

A man walks out of the Presidential palace in Nicosia.

A youth skates in front of the Orthodox Faneromeni church in central Nicosia.

.

Turkish Cypriot men, with a flag breakaway Turkish Cypriot state on the wall, pray at a mosque during Friday prayers in Famagusta's Tatlisu village, in the Turkish-administered northern part of Cyprus.

Turkish Cypriot children enjoy the mild weather in a park near an empty U.N. watchtower on the Greenline dividing the Turkish and Greek Cypriot sides of Nicosia.

A man kitesurfs near a beach at Limassol town in southern Cyprus.

 

Cyclists look at boats in a marina near Limassol, a coastal town in southern Cyprus.

A Turkish-Cypriot and a Turkish flags are seen on Pentadaktylos mountain in the northern part of Nicosia.

...

A group of tourists stand in an amphitheatre in the ancient Salamis bay ruins near Famagusta in north Cyprus.

An orchestra performs during an official ceremony marking the assumption of Cyprus' six-monthly presidency of the European Union at the ancient Curium amphitheatre, near Limassol.

Flags of Northern Cyprus (2nd R) and Turkey (R) are seen in front of an Orthodox church (L) and a mosque, in the main square of Dipkarpaz, Riso Karpaso, some 150 km (93 miles) east of Nicosia, in the Turkish administered northern part of Cyprus.

rediff

The Little that Hugo Chávez Got Right

There was a time when the world spoke of “Venezuelan Exceptionalism.” For nearly half a century—while Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay were military dictatorships, the Andean nations were trapped in a carousel of coups d’état, and violent civil insurgency seemed ubiquitous—Venezuela was South America’s only stable and functional democracy. Today that exceptionalism cuts the other way. As Latin America rises, Venezuela is a backwater, starkly divided on social and political grounds and wantonly violent: a world leader in kidnappings, murders, and prison riots. It is a country with a broken heart.

And now, with President Hugo Chávez dead from an unspecified cancer at just 58 years of age, things look bleaker than ever. There were times when I—long an unapologetic opponent of Chávez and his revolution—dreamed that an early death for El Comandante might save Venezuela. No such luck. In his short time in charge, Nicolás Maduro, the successor, has already proven himself to be as erratic as Chávez, a bit meaner, and far more insecure.

Yet I find myself traipsing into the backwoods of my own conviction. What if, in rejecting Chávez, I unwittingly placed myself on the wrong side of history? In the few days since the announcement of his death, I have found myself returning to this question often. Am I simply feeling compassion for a fellow person suffering and dying from terrible illness? Is it empathy for the millions who have responded to Chávez’s death with earnest sadness? Or perhaps, having so often spoken ill of the now dead, I have guilt on my conscience.

In 1992, when Chávez first rose to fame following a failed coup attempt against President Carlos Andrés Pérez, I was ten years old. I remember watching the footage of his surrender, but little else of the bereted man on TV.

I certainly knew who he was by the time he ran for president in 1998. Venezuela was in a deep, multi-decade recession, with international crude selling at around $8 per barrel and the Latin American debt crisis front and center. The pact that until then had seen the two major parties trade off turns at the helm was largely discredited. And suddenly this energetic and charismatic soldier, recently freed from prison, was flush with talk of equality and a fresh start. Many saw him as a way out of the malaise, and even among those who did not support him, including much of my family, there was a sense that Chávez highlighted the flaws in the status quo. He was a sign of the changes that needed to come, if not the change itself. And, at the very least, he was entertaining.

How wrong they were. It did not take long for me to realize that, to Chávez, the country’s future did not have much use for its current middle class: hard-working men and women who were treated increasingly like enemies of the state. Much of my family started to leave Venezuela. The first wave was seeking greener pastures; later they would leave out of fear.

Yet while I may have disagreed with Chávez and disliked the direction he was steering the country, my real, personal struggle against the Venezuelan regime began with the demonstrations of May 2007. Chávez had closed down Radio Caracas Television, thereby silencing the sole remaining national broadcaster critical of his government. I joined thousands of protestors, mostly students, who descended on Caracas’s Plaza Brión. While government loudspeakers warned us to remain calm, police fired teargas, rubber bullets, and water cannons into the crowd.

I staggered away from the chaos. Although a vinegar-soaked rag covering my mouth and nose staved off total physical collapse, the mixture of teargas and sweat had caused me to expel my contact lenses. Once the twin adrenaline shots of fear and indignation subsided, I faced a long, largely blind, walk home. Squinting, crying, and filthy, I was reborn. At that moment, I hated Hugo Chávez. He wasn’t misguided, he wasn’t a comical buffoon, and he wasn’t a sign of change. He was horrifying: a violent and cruel despot who ruthlessly crushed dissent, even from unarmed students, and threatened the human rights of anyone who disagreed with his policies.

Six years later I remain dedicated to this conviction. In that time I have written op-eds and long analytical articles, appeared on foreign television and NPR, and spent countless hours blogging, networking, and commiserating with other dissidents. I write a weekly political column in one of the highest-circulating independent Venezuelan newspapers that is consistently critical of the Chavista government. For nearly a year heading into legislative elections, I worked for an opposition-led municipal government that presided over Petare, a large and dangerous slum. I submitted myself to the daily perils of the barrios in hopes that I might be able to knock a new kink into that tired trope: “The poor love Chávez, with good reason.”

Not that there isn’t a grain of truth to the clichés. Chávez took advantage of a huge rise in the price of crude oil to pay for social programs. While much of this bonanza has gone into flashy and unnecessary displays of international largesse—such as procuring submarines and giving away oil as far afield as Boston—extreme poverty has fallen domestically, and the most basic health services, food, and shelter are more accessible than they were before. Community sports and music programs likewise have more funding and offer new paths out of poverty. At the same time, other opportunities have disappeared with the wholesale flight of the middle class, and thanks to price controls and expropriation that harm the private sector.

Whether some other government—similarly blessed with an extended oil windfall yet less determined to retain power at any cost—could have made the same social investments will forever remain an open question. The Chavista government was not the first in Venezuela to place the poor at the center of the national conversation, and it won’t be the last. Despite the occasional neoliberal flare up, Caracas always returns to its roots: a large, paternalistic state dedicated to turning petrodollars into popularity through redistribution and social assistance.

My own re-assessment of Chávez has been excruciating—but it is also vital.

It’s also not clear if Chávez was genuinely concerned about improving the lives of the poor or merely set on reinforcing their dependence on him. He was surely not one to eschew the luxuries of office for himself or his family. Reportedly, his once-humble parents accumulated around 3,500 acres of property and $16 million in cash during his reign. Expensive oil diplomacy and giveaways to neighbors such as Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina translated into an unprecedented degree of international clout for Venezuela and her president, but also meant prioritizing prestige over domestic needs.

However, what cannot be denied, what gives me pause as I consider my own resistance to Chavismo, is that the regime did make a large segment of the population feel empowered and relevant for the first time in recent memory. In a few cases these priorities even translated into real results. For instance, it is now easier for poor Venezuelans to obtain the national IDs and passports that give them access to government services and full standing as citizens. And Chávez publicly championed a great many progressive causes even if the end results have been mixed.

In terms of ethnicity, gender, and class composition, Chávez’s government seemed far more representative of the country as a whole than were many precursor governments. Under Chávez indigenous religions, hybrids such as Santeria, non-Catholic Christian sects, and Islam saw their status and visibility upgraded as the traditionally dominant Catholic Church was undermined by the ever-expanding state. Special missions have been set up to care for unwed teenage mothers. And abortion, while still illegal, has in some cases become more accessible and is more openly discussed.

I believe these were small but positive steps, although not many others in the anti-Chavismo camp agree with me.

Having been born in the United States to Venezuelan parents and hopped back and forth between the two countries my whole life, I’ve become accustomed to a certain amount of contextual recalibration. In the United States I am a moderate liberal, a bit suspicious of expansive government but consistently supportive of Democrats thanks to their stances on social issues that are important to me. In 2008 I was a volunteer for the Obama campaign in Miami, where I targeted prospective Cuban and Venezuelan American voters: folks like me.

In Venezuela I’m reactionary. I have always felt that it is the spectrum of political views itself that changes, not me. Thus I was sometimes uncomfortable during my time with the opposition in Caracas, particularly when it came to views on LGBT rights, women’s health, and the proper place for religious and ethnic minorities within society. In these areas, segments of the opposition have it backwards. They are far less progressive than either me or the regime we were fighting against.

Chávez’s sense of social justice and equality were by no means universal, though. Those who disagreed with him politically were left out of the system. Thousands were blacklisted as political enemies, and many were imprisoned on pretense. Others had their livelihoods or property seized without compensation.

Venezuela’s Jewish population in particular came under fire from the regime. In 2004 a Hebrew school in the capital was raided by government forces ostensibly seeking contraband; the children were left locked in a room for several hours, incommunicado. The search found nothing. Similar incidents also took place in 2007 and 2009. Chávez’s bad relations with Israel—diplomatic contact was severed entirely in 2009—and his close relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have likewise contributed to a climate of fear and intimidation. He leveled accusations of disloyalty against Venezuelan Jews who did not renounce Israel, and recent reports suggest that government forces have been systematically monitoring the Jewish population for years.

Contradictions such as these—professing, on the one hand, support for marginalized people, while, on the other hand, harassing and intimidating political opponents and specific minorities—are common in modern Venezuela. What are we to think of them? One must always prioritize among competing issues to determine for oneself if the whole is desirable, palatable, or disastrous.

Taking stock in this way is a sobering exercise—my own re-assessment of Chávez has been excruciating—but it is also vital. In Latin America, with its history of drastic over-corrections from far right to far left, we must discipline ourselves to see the good in the bad, if only to avoid perpetuating the vicious cycle. Indeed, this lesson transcends Venezuela and Latin America. It is readily applicable to the nascent republics of the Arab Spring and even to the increasingly contentious and polarized United States.

I suspect that history will remember Chávez’s fourteen years in power as a time of great missed opportunity. Enormous wealth and a historic personality intersected in a way that seemed to hold great promise—promise that will remain forever unfulfilled, frozen in contrast to bleak reality. The Venezuela Chávez leaves behind is in most ways worse off than the one that was first entrusted to him.

And yet opponents would do well to remember what it was about Chávez—or, more so, what he sought to represent—that did have value. The little piece of the revolution that might have been worthwhile, were it not for all the rest.

Bostonreview

Mathematics: How does one calculate a television's height and width based on its diagonal length and aspect ratio?

TV screens are flat rectangular shapes, and when we cut it diagonally, in effect we are having two equivalent right angle triangles.

So we have diagonal length as , whose value is say 36".

Aspect ratio is the ratio between height and width in effect  say it is something like 16:9.

So in effect



.

X here is unknown variable that would give us the actual width and height.

So here we have a right angled triangle with the longest side  and the other two sides being 

So for a right angle triangle we apply the Pythagoras theorem here, and that would mean



Now taking x to one side




Once we find value of X, that would give us the actual height and width.
quora

Popes and their watches

When the news broke last month that Pope Bendidict XVI was resigning, a HODINKEE reader asked me rather sarcastically: Does the Pope get a retirement watch? Since no Pope has "retired" in the last six hundred years, there’s not much of a precedent here for a Pope receiving a timepiece at the end of his service. When Pope Gregory XII retired in 1415, the first spring-driven portable clocks were still decades away.

But if a Pope was to get a watch as a gift for retirement or a commemorative event, he would have to get a Patek Philippe of course. Leaders of the church have a long history wearing Patek Philippe. Here’s the story:

Patek Philippe founding father Antoine Norbert de Patek  (1812-1877) was a fervent Catholic who passionately defended his Polish homeland and his faith. He worked tirelessly for the Zmartwycwstancy, the Congregation of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the group recognized him for his work in The Church. In 1865, Patek was knighted as a Count circa 1865 from the Republic of San Marino and was recognized by the Vatican for his role in supporting the Holy See. In fact, the Calatrava cross that is on the crown of your modern Patek Philippe is a logo that dates back to the 1870s and clearly had religious significance for Mr. Patek. Pocket watch cases began being stamped or engraved with the Calatrava logo dating back to the time Patek was trying to restore a Catholic Poland.

During Antoine Norbert de Patek’s later years, Pius IX (1792-1878) was head of the church, from 1846 until his death, and he was an enthusiastic multiple Patek owner – he wore an open-face quarter-repeating 49 mm Patek Philippe made for him in 1866, complete with a caseback polychromatically enameled with his Papal arms and a cuvette engraved “Pater, Rex / Dirigas Intelligentias et Corda, Geneva, 29 June 1867” ("Our father, Sovereign, You Give Direction to the Spirit and the Heart”).  This watch was sold at auction in 1989 and can now be seen at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva, as well as in the photo above. Pope Pius IX also owned a silver open-face Patek Philippe watch given to him from the Swiss Catholic organization Piusverein in 1877. This watch recently sold at auction and can be see here.

After Pope Pius IX died in 1878, the next Pope, Leo XIII (1810-1903, elected Pope in 1878), continued the tradition of Papal Patek ownership. He is believed to have received a silver and rose gold Patek Philippe pocket watch in 1901 as a gift to commemorate his anniversary of becoming Pope. This watch can also be seen at the Patek Philippe Museum. 

Fast forward to 1970, and the first Patek Philippe wristwatches believed to be associated with a Pope were ordered from the retailer Haussman in Rome.

According to a new book titled Patek Philippe: Cult Object and Investment by Michael Mehltretter, twelve Ref. 3588 automatic watches were delivered to the Vatican in 1971, each made with a custom dial in "Papal Purple" with faceted gold batons. The watches were intended to be gifted to Cardinals and church VIPs.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Vatican also utilized a Patek Philippe master timing system to control the time signals throughout the city. The master timing system was state-of-the-art for its day and kept the Vatican on time for years with its numerous slave clocks. For more information on these master timing systems, see this earlier post.

For the recently-retired Pope Bendict XVI, it doesn’t look like he was given a Patek Philippe for his service but he did recently receive a Erhard Junghans Tempus Automatic.  Maybe Pope Francis will have better luck.

Surely, Patek Philippe must have been on the mind of the overseers of the Catholic church for many years, as the company and the church had mutual admiration for generations.  For the watch world, the quest to know the secrets of the Patek archives is not dissimilar to the global fascination with the untold secrets of the Vatican.  Could there be some more horological treasure buried deep below the Vatican? Probably. And I'd venture to guess more than a few bear the Calatrava cross of Patek Philippe.