When Irish Eyes are Smiling

By Jamie Douglas

There is a new standard for when Irish eyes are smiling. After suffering bravely through being one of the PIIGS, being the first one of them to grab the steer by the horns, and doing what was necessary to work toward an honorable recovery, the country just won the Irish Sweepstakes, literally.

The Providence Resources Exploration Company announced almost in conjunction with the Patron Saint’s Day, that they found a massive oilfield off the coast of Cork on March 15, 2012. This is the first time that any sort of commercial oil and gas discovery has been made off the Emerald Isle.

The Barryroe, as she has been named, is a mere 300ft deep and has already started to produce 3,514 barrels of Norwegian quality sweet Brent crude per day (over a million US$ every 3 days), and as a by the way, it is also gifting the Irish with almost 3 million standard cubic feet of gas per day. Come next winter, the Irish should stay warm and toasty.

It has been thought for quite a while now that the southwestern continental shelf of Ireland may hold many valuable resources, but the area is still massively underexplored by world standards. All of us are aware of the environmental dangers of offshore drilling, and I sincerely hope that in this and all future discoveries and extractions all precautions will be mandated to keep damages to an absolute minimum. That said, it must be accepted that as long as the planet is energy dependent on hydrocarbons, their exploitation will cause some unavoidable damages to Mother Earth.

It is estimated that the initial discovery could lead to the recovery of up to ten billion barrels of crude as well as trillions of cubic feet of gas. The current field is estimated to hold about one billion barrels alone. At today’s price of Brent crude, that is a mighty $126 billion, more than enough to help the Celtic Tiger’s economy recover.

Ireland is a member of the European Economic Union and is a member of the €uro zone, however, like the UK, it never became a member of the Schengen Zone, thereby freeing the potential expat from a lot of restrictive regulations that cover most of the continent. For most who are looking to move to Ireland seeking work, try Parador instead. If however you are looking to be a self-sufficient retiree, there are opportunities there for you. Additionally, there are lower taxes as well as special opportunities for working artists.

Ireland has a lot to offer to the leisure oriented expat, from the big cities to the lonely countryside, which have some of the narrowest roads in the world. Some of you may find that there is a bit more rain than what you would prefer, but that is what makes it the Emerald Isle. There are many properties on the market right now, due to the sudden infirmity of the Celtic Tiger, many of them being great bargains after the superheated pre-bubble-popping period, but generally still in the medium-high range.

For those drawn to the climate and the economic conditions, my advice as always is to go there for a few months (and not just during the best of the summer months), rent a place where you think you would feel at home, and give it a go. If it works out for you, you can always buy a cottage with an extra bedroom for your favorite expat writer (My wife and I are really good house guests and carry our own weight!).

Ireland is facing a miraculous recovery and will be ready to receive you with open arms. And if you get bored, there is Scotland, the UK, and all of Europe available by way of low cost Ryan Air, Enjoy it. The green, green summer time is coming.

Jamie Douglas

International Banking: Not As Safe As We Thought

Jamie Douglas

All expats, all over the world, regardless of where they are from and where they are at, have to deal with financial institutions. Those of us who have internet access at home or in public places have always been assured that our transactions were secured by something called SSL Encryption, a method, we have been assured by “experts,” was inviolable. Or so we were told.

Now, in the same month that the CIA has been hacked, researchers, those of the mathematical type as well as super smart cryptographers, have discovered an apparent series of flaws that allow malicious users of the internet to break the code, which when used properly make it theoretically impossible to intercept the flow of information between two encoded correspondents. Yet it is being intercepted and used to generate random numbers.

The chances of your being affected are very small – 2 in 1000. That, taking into account the hundreds of millions of online transactions taking place daily, opens up a giant window of opportunity for the hackers in Eastern Europe, Israel, and China. Our entire faith in the SSL system rests on the assumption that it is inviolable.

For expats or anyone else conducting financial transactions over the internet, there is nothing you can do. The ball lands squarely in the court of the big site operators, sites like Amazon.com, all large financial institutions, the IRS, and other nations’ equivalent thereof. Every individual is a potential victim of this weakness in the system, without having the slightest ability to protect themselves, other than cessation of use of the modern world that brings us online banking and shopping.

These discoveries were originally slated to be published at a cryptographer conference this coming August in Santa Barbara, California; however the urgency of the discovery raised such serious issues that a decision was made to release the findings immediately. The researchers, including the highly respected Dutch mathematician Arjen K. Lenstra, the renowned professor at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne in Switzerland, used the Euclidian algorithm to examine the public key numbers, and they were able to prove that a small amount of those randomly generated numbers were not so random after all.

In their publicly released findings, they stated that there are almost 27,000 keys that offer no security. “Their secret keys are accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to redo our work” The original work was enabled by the fact that there were databases of the publicly available keys, which were kept at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Another of the researchers, James P. Hughes, a cryptanalyst who worked with the group insisted: “…we were very careful: we did not intercept any traffic and we did not sniff any networks. We went to databases that contained public information and downloaded the public keys.”

They point out that their lack of sophisticated methods make it that much more likely that some malicious hackers have discovered the flaws in the random number generators some time before they did. “The quagmire of vulnerabilities that we waded into makes it infeasible to properly inform everyone involved, though we made the best effort to inform the larger parties and contacted all email addresses recommended or specified in still valid certificates. The fact that most certificates do not contain adequate contact information limited our options. Our decision to make our finding public at this time, despite our inability to directly notify everyone, was a judgment call.”

And a very good one I might add. With the publicity surrounding this issue, it is highly unlikely that any corporate IT security department will ignore this, and I am sure that a lot of midnight oil will be burnt from Berlin to Bangalore until this problem will be patched.

And what can you do to protect yourself? Tell your in-house IT guy or gal to make sure that all the algorithms are in a randomly disarranged row.

With this, I have done my job to disseminate this information to you. Please pass it on.

Jamie Douglas

How Secure Are You in Latin America?

By Jamie Douglas

Many of us expats have relocated to Latin America because it is simple and feels relatively close to home. But what are the realities?

Harsh! With the uncertainty of the world economies, even the bigger nations are facing major problems. Then you have all the instability of political systems from Mexico to Argentina, military coups, impeachments, overheated economies, and completely incompetent politicians running major nations and economies into the ground. You also have a large segment of young people unemployed and under employed, many of them with little chance of ever achieving their ambitions, with huge segments of the population being so piss poor that they live in readymade slums without any services or police protection.

Then there are all of the various slime balls on so many websites wanting to sell you real estate, gold mines, fractional ownership vineyards... Panama, Costa Rica, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, Argentina et al all seem to be just waiting for you to buy into their economy by hooking up with ex cons that somehow managed to get themselves back south to run their scams again, whether it be for spiritual reasons, medical tourism, donating to help pay for eye operations for poor blind children by sponsoring fictional events that somehow never seem to materialize, buying property on beautiful Lake Chapala in Mexico, or listening to financial advice from a man that spent years in prison for ripping people off and is at it again now.

Admittedly, there are a whole bunch of expats that seem to have left their brains behind when they left their home countries. They fall for virtually every bullshit line being thrown at them from every direction, because the pitch man or woman speaks their language, wines then and dines them, showing full color brochures and plans: this is where we are going the build the clubhouse, and this is where the caretakers residence will be. You are standing on where the swimming pool will be and of course it will be gated with 24 hour armed guards patrolling. You will make your money back in 4 or 5 years by selling your grapes and we will of course take care of everything.

If you want to expatriate or already did because you think your government is incompetent, you don’t even have a clue what incompetence and bureaucratic nightmares await you south of the border. Worried that the US is becoming a social welfare state? Then name me one country in Latin America that is not a social welfare state by necessity. I can’t think of one myself, and I feel I am somewhat of an expert on Latin America.

Mexican Elections: The forever-in-power PRI is set to take back the presidency because the opposition is just as corrupt, but much more inept than the PRI ever was (note the 55,000 dead in Calderon’s war on drugs). The economy is doing quite well, but the distribution of wealth leaves a lot to be desired, what with the world’s richest man, Carlos “Slim” Helu, being Mexican.

Guatemala is not much better, with crime out of control and a government that got elected on the backs of the poor with empty promises.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world and there is no security there for anyone. Yet American and Canadian real estate sharks have established themselves there, trying to sell beachfront land to any suckers willing to listen to their pitch on how safe it all is and that here is no crime, it is all in the big cities. Big time crime has moved out to the Bay Islands, victimizing unsuspecting tourists. And they recently had a military coup that unseated the democratically elected president.

Belize? Yes there are a few people living in a few isolated spots that are raving about how great the place is. Look into it a little deeper before you chase your dreams to the latest narco heaven, where planes just keep dropping out of the sky, but with the help of the authorities, no drugs are ever recovered. Crime is high and the infrastructure of the nation is atrocious. Try having to need emergency medical assistance.

El Salvador? If you are considering that nation you need a brain transplant, but hopefully not in one of their many private clinics.

Costa Rica? 100,000 American expats have made sure that the former expat haven is not that anymore. With real estate rip-offs, tourist robberies and murders of expats, the national sport is not soccer, but robbing tourists, and to top it off, their President Laura Chinchilla is a corrupt idiot.

Panama? Also a formerly nice place to chill, but now full of American ex-cons, liars, and cheats, like the King of Serial Bankruptcy, Donald Trump, who managed to fleece a few sucker investors again out of hundreds of millions of dollars (as usual, it’s not his fault). President Martinelli has given shelter to a slew of international swindlers and has given a whole new meaning to the word “corruption.” It is from here that all those crooks trying to convince you that

Colombia is the next big thing, trying to convince you that the gold mines, the cattle industry, clear cutting the jungle, the fashion industry and so much more are so easy to get into. Just send money to the account in Panama. Colombia has nothing to offer to the average expat except insecurity and cheap cocaine. Direct flights to Miami several times a day, with kidneys being as easily available as they are in

Peru, which is a country that does have some promise and great history. It is the home of Machu Picchu as well as millions of undernourished and sick indigenous children and adults. The new president came into office with a promise of using the country’s incredible mineral wealth to improve the unequal distribution of wealth, bringing health care to the remote regions, but he is still (again) fighting the Sendero Luminoso guerillas.

Ecuador also has way too many gringos and oil companies in the jungles creating havoc. It is not the expat retreat it was so recently. A highly unstable government with an irrational president are making that a difficult destination, but not to worry, your white shoed American real estate friends will be waiting for you to sell you a nice condo in Cuenca, where eternal spring is the rule and medical care for the wealthy is always available in the big cities.

Chile had their experiment with socialism with their former Presidenta, Michelle Bachelet who was replaced by an extreme neo-liberal Chicago School of Economics Ayn Rand adherent, the richest man in Chile, Sebastian Piñera who could give a shit about the poor or the environment. His banks are making a huge fortune, lending money at very high interest rates to the upper middle class so their children can attend higher institutes of learning. While the students are protesting, demanding free education, he answered them with the riot police, killing some protestors, and trying to build huge hydroelectric projects in the Chilean Patagonian wilderness, to then run transmission lines the length of the nation to the very northern mining region of Antofagasta. He is so unpopular that it is unlikely his party will get re-elected, but who knows, he may very well follow the example of

Argentina, where Queen Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, quite possibly the most incompetent and corrupt leader that poor suffering nation ever had, assured herself re-election by having trucks going around the barrios of greater Buenos Aires, giving away free meat to the poor, and flat screen TV’s at a bargain price to the retirees. The majority of the population of this Southern Cone nation lives in the greater Buenos Aires area, where she did all her charitable work. The opposition parties conceded the election weeks before the election, not even mounting a concerted coalition opposition. Her Peronist thug party now holds an absolute majority in both the upper and lower houses, as well as controlling the Supreme Court and all the important federal judgeships.

Meanwhile the economy of Argentina is heading into the shitter with astonishing speed. Her government has been lying about inflation and unemployment for so long that they have institutionalized it. The independent non-government economists that are using real figures to peg inflation at about 25% are being threatened with astronomical fines for revealing the truth, so they are using the opposition legislators in Congress to release the figures.

Her son Maximiliano meanwhile is leading “La Campera”, a militant Peronist youth movement, and is being groomed to eventually take over the dying and bankrupt country. Argentina has what I call a circular history, where every few years the nation goes from one economic disaster to the next meltdown. The next one will occur within the next twelve months, and Cristina will promptly have another nervous breakdown. For the foreseeable future, Argentina, with its almost daily new currency restrictions, is an absolute taboo for expats and investors. Getting residency has become one of the worst bureaucratic nightmares imaginable, almost as bad as in

Brazil, where you have to practice for the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games to jump thru all the hoops for residency. Former President Lula da Silva took on a bit more than the country can digest with a weakening economy worldwide by committing a trillion US dollars to pay for the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games. That all sounded very good while the world’s economies were overheated, fueled by artificial money, but that has now come to an end. The continuing €uro crisis has severely affected Brazil’s currency, and this year so far ore exports to China are down 26%. FIFA is deeply concerned that Brazil will not be ready for the World Cup in time, and the infrastructure improvements are lagging way behind schedule. Corruption has played a large part in Dilma Rousseff’s administration, an administration she largely inherited from the hugely popular former President Lula da Silva. So far 10 ministers have been forced from office for proven and blatant corruption. Lula meanwhile has “recovered” from his cancer and, in his words, is planning to run for president again, if Dilma chooses to vacate the position, an arrangement that was reached before he left office and supported her to be his placeholder while he had to sit out a term. At least he did not do what many other Latin American leaders have done, which is to change the constitution to allow himself to run again and again.

Paraguay meanwhile had a velvet coup with the 2-hour impeachment of the horny bishop Fernando Lugo. He has been a thorn in the side of the ruling elite of that landlocked country for quite a while now, since he openly supports the struggle of the landless peasants, many of whom are occupying lands owned by some of Paraguay’s wealthiest elite. Interestingly enough, on June 28th and 29th there was a summit in Mendoza, Argentina of the heads of state of the Mercosur nations, of which Paraguay’s now-former President Fernando Lugo was president. The Paraguayan delegation was not allowed to enter the conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Mendoza. Former President Lugo had originally announced that he would go to explain the situation of the massacre of 17 peasants and military, but he changed his mind when he found out that he might not be permitted to re-enter Paraguay. Not even he wants to live in exile in Argentina. Perhaps he can join Julian Assange in Ecuador, if Assange gets exile there, and they might be flown there in

Bolivian President Evo Morales’ new 27 million dollar jet, which will now require a 40 million dollar “executive terminal” for the security of the former coca farmer, who managed to screw his fellow coca farmers and indigenous supporters by trying to build a Brazilian financed 4 lane highway through the indigenous reservation that was granted to its inhabitants in perpetuity.

When considering where to expatriate to, remember one thing: Nothing ever stays the same! But you can always go back to where you came from, with your tail tucked between your legs, and try to get one of those sought after jobs as a Wal-Mart greeter. You probably will need to get something like that after your former new best friends in Panama have cleaned your clock. On second thought, why not just stay in the USA and go to Montana to start a dental floss farm?

Jamie Douglas

Out There