Educating the next generation of cargo-cultists

If you ever read any of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, you will have encountered the famous “cargo cults”, where Pacific Islanders built imitations of landing strips, airplaines, etc, hoping that magically attract the wealth of more advanced cultures.

Of course, you could argue that Spain’s massive airport over-expansion is a more advanced form of cargo-cultism. It would be interesting to know exactly which magical rituals they were hoping to invoke by building an enormous (ironically slightly Easter-island like) statue of a corrupt Valencian politician next to the plane-less Castellon airport..

But enough about airports and airlines. It was just meant as an introduction to my son’s latest homework assignment.

“Today we are studying cameras in science!” he says.

“Great! So what have you learned?”

“Well, they have given us a sheet with a picture of a camera and all the names of the buttons and we need to memorize them. Flash, macro, zoom, show picture, power.”

“Do you know what flash is?”

“No.”

“Did they explain to you anything about how a camera works?”

“No”

“Did the teacher bring a camera to class?”

“No. Just the photocopies.”

“What about the button to take the picture?”

“Well we don’t need to learn that one, it doesn’t have any label”

And this is supposed to be one of the best schools in Spain.

Spanair and Spain’s harmful bankruptcy legislation

Spain managed to score a huge own-goal with the abrupt shutdown of Spanair. In a country that relies on tourism as a huge fraction of it’s GDP, the secondary damage to the tourist sector will be huge. The sad thing is that this is a lose-lose situation for everyone: tourists get stranded in Spain (or never come in the first place) and unsecured creditors will get little to nothing.

In the US, Spanair would have entered bankruptcy under “Chapter 13” last year, which would have allowed it to continue day-to-day as the owners, receivers and creditors figure out a way to either shrink, sell, renegotiate, etc in order to maximize the value for everyone. Only in the case where things were absolutely hopeless and there was no business value whatsoever, would the company have been liquidated.

Spain is different, of course. If you want the gory details, go here, but the executive summary is this:

A debtor in Spain would only resort to file a petition for suspension of payments or bankruptcy as a last measure, when it is generally too late to take effective actions for restructuring the business. Thus, most of the insolvency cases in Spain (including both suspension of payments and bankruptcy proceedings) end up with the liquidation of the debtor’s assets.

There you have it. Expect this to only get worse as companies are squeezed on one end by higher commodity prices, and by lower demand on the other. At the same time, debts increase and there is no way of restructuring other than liquidation.

The only action the Spanish government seems to have done is sue Spanair for not honoring their commitments to passengers, which seems like the ultimate in pointlessness.

Autism in Catalunya

One of our kids has a relatively mild form of autism (helpfully named “Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified”), which basically means he does really well in school but gets teased a lot. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure I had the same thing. It actually took us much longer than normal to get a diagnosis, because we had the bad luck of getting a psychologist who was from the psychoanalytical persuasion. In case you were wondering, psychoanalysis is that old-school Freudian thing where you blame people’s problems on frigid mothers, repressed emotions, etc.

What we hadn’t been aware of, was that there is a bit of a time-wrap here in Catalunya, France and parts of Switzerland, where psychoanalysis has managed to remain a dominant force in the treatment of autism, despite the fact that the rest of the world realized this was a really bad idea since the 1970s or so. One explanation is that that during the Second World War, pro-Vichy psychiatrists believed in the genetic theory whereas pro-Resistance professionals took the psychoanalytic approach. A recent film has been stirring up controversy in France, mostly due to the fact that it makes psychoanalysts look like idiots. You can watch it on YouTube with English subtitles.

In any case, if you think your kid might have social or development issues, one very good place to take them is the “Unidad Especializada en Trastornos del Desarrollo” at Sant Joan de Deu Hospital in Barcelona. Unfortunately the waiting list is quite long (we contacted them in April and got the diagnosis in December). On the positive side, since this is a public hospital, the diagnosis can be used for official purposes, such as getting a certificate of disability, which can be used to get priority assignment to a school would be a good fit for your child.

Unfortunately, due to funding cuts, Sant Joan de Deu doesn’t do treatment anymore, but there are very good resources out there. For Sant Cugat, we’ve looked into the Asociación TEA (Asperger) valles occidental, which provide psychologists (more along the lines of behavioral and congnative therapy), in addition to a extra-curricular space, where kids with similar issues get together and practice their social interaction while being supervised by psychologists. So far our experience has been very positive, even just being with other parents that have similar concerns has been a great help for us.

Espeonza Aguirre

I have a new twitter stream to follow…. the fake Esperanza Aguirre. Here are my favorites:

"Dear three wise men: I need new minorities to marginalize. Bring me a tribe of black Basques and sissies." LOL I'm a dreamer.

In 2012, we will require banks to provide social assistance, they’ll let you sleep in ATMs! LOL It's funny because it's humiliating.

The curtain rises. Appears a school and a hospital. The title of the movie? "Something to cut!" LOL It's about people with feelings.

Mary had a little lamb

Our five year old at the dinner table today:

"We're eating lamb?"

"Yes."

"Is it dead?"

"Yes, I hope so."

"Where is the wool?"

"Umm, we took it off first."

"Is the lamb an animal that is in peligro de extincion?"

So you think you can just take your money and run…

I was talking to a banker today about how to transfer money out of Spain. Turns out that if you are a resident here, you can’t just go to your bank and give them an IBAN number from the Cayman islands (or another European country for that matter) and ask them to transfer it. Even if the money is perfectly legitimate and you’ve paid your taxes on it and everything.

Turns out that before the bank will allow you to transfer significant sums of money (I think it’s around 50,000 euros), you need to have a certified DD1 form from the Bank of Spain, telling them about your foreign account. This can take some time. Once you have this, then your bank needs to do some of paperwork on their and you can expect the transfer to be done several weeks after that.

So, if you are planning on engaging in a little bit of capital flight, you might want to do a bit of preemptive planning, because if things get crazy, getting your money out before they get turned into Pesetas might be impossible. The doors are already there, and shutting them would not be that difficult.

In any case, it appears that if you are a resident in Spain you need to declare to the Bank of Spain that you have opened/closed foreign accounts or transferred large sums of money.

Toilet paper rationing hits Catalan schools

Now students are only allowed to consume 25 meters of toilet paper per month. Exactly how this limit is going to be enforced wasn’t really clear. Currently, it seems that schools will just receive a strongly worded letter.