Making A Better World - Milton Louw

This column first appeared in the Namibian newspaper on 29 November 2012 The inability of people to purchase a first time home is a common complaint heard everywhere in the country. In this column I would like to look at problems created by property speculators and what can be done to assist in getting a bigger portion of our citizens to become homeowners. One of the ways that speculators make money can be illustrated through the townhouse developments that have been springing up all over the country.  When the developer starts a project, most of the selling is done to a network of friends, family and other speculators who already own a property and gave the relationship with a bank to get the required financing fairly quickly and easily. Thus, sometime even before the first earth is turned, most of the houses in the development have already been sold. These purchasers however do not need to pay for the property until the actual development is completed. This means that they h...

(First appeared in Consumer News Namibia Magazine May 2013) Recently there was an article in an international publication about “smart toilets” being installed by municipal authorities of Toronto, Canada. The toilets were being installed at the city’s convention centre, the equivalent of our Windhoek Showgrounds. The purpose of installing the toilets is to allow them to analyse the data collected from the toilet. When I heard about it, my first question had to be why? The second issue that came to mind is that there is no more privacy if I should use a public smart toilet. (As I read further in the article, it turned out that the “smart toilets” was actually a publicity stunt.) But let us look a little bit deeper at what the company was actually claiming to do. The fake company is called Quantified Toilets and they claimed to have installed sensors in the Toronto Convention centre and other public venues that would automatically analyse “deposits” in the toilets to detect ...

First appeared in Consumer News Namibia Magazine April 2013) There is a new documentary called FED UP, that takes a look at the global problem of obesity and obesity-related diseases (In other words “Why are humans fat?”). Some years back the first consumer oriented documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, made waves and created awareness of the issue surrounding climate change. In, FED UP, the filmmakers continue with this tradition with a hard-hitting challenge over the misconceptions (and food industry-sponsored misinformation) about diet and exercise, good and bad calories, fat genes and lifestyle. One of the biggest misconceptions about sugar is addressed in the film. According to the film’s scientific consultant Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist, author and president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition, “when it comes to obesity, fat may not be our friend but it’s not the enemy that sugar is.” This view is gathering support from doctors all across the world. To...