Taking risks
Taking risksYou are all probably aware of the tragic bus crash on Tuesday near Eilat that killed 25 Russians. It was a tour by travel agents from St. Petersburg looking to see Eilat and how to develop tourism there. Now it has all gone terribly wrong.
Apparently two buses that were taking the Russians from the Uvda airport to nearby Eilat were racing to see who could get there first. The roads there are treacherous, yet time and gain Israeli drivers, including buses take the bends too fast. It appears that this 38 year old driver had 22 former traffic violations. It should be agaisnst the law to employ such a person driving others, yet in Israel, although the laws are often good, there is little enforcement, and time and again there are tragic road accidents where people are killed. This year the rate is more than one person killed a day, and last week there were 10 killed on the roads. It is a devastating fact in a country that supposedly values human life.
It is difficult to explain it, and it is generally not the roads that have been worked on for years and are becoming increasingly better. I put it down to the tendency for Israelis to take risks, to go faster than is safe, to beat the odds. I think this is also a Jewish trait. One correlation is the tendency for Jews to take risks in business, to establish companies that might fail. Japanese and Germans are well known to be risk-averse, and Americans are much more likely to be prepared to take risks, and particualrly Jews. So it is a double-edged sword, taking risks makes Israelis good soldiers, but bad drivers.
The current economic crisis has been exacerbated by the failure of an illegal "Ponzi" scheme by Bernard Madoff, head of an investment firm that guaranteed a 12% profit, that turned out to be a fruad. He was taking from new investors to pay older ones. This type of scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, a New England man in the 1920s who defrauded many people in this way. The fact that Madoff is Jewish might lead to great anti-Semitism, but the fact is that also most of the victims who lost money in his scheme were Jewish, including many Jewish charities such as Yeshiva University, where he was in charge of investments! Hopefully he will go to jail, so unfortunately this tendencey to take risks can get Jews in a lot of trouble
Apparently two buses that were taking the Russians from the Uvda airport to nearby Eilat were racing to see who could get there first. The roads there are treacherous, yet time and gain Israeli drivers, including buses take the bends too fast. It appears that this 38 year old driver had 22 former traffic violations. It should be agaisnst the law to employ such a person driving others, yet in Israel, although the laws are often good, there is little enforcement, and time and again there are tragic road accidents where people are killed. This year the rate is more than one person killed a day, and last week there were 10 killed on the roads. It is a devastating fact in a country that supposedly values human life.
It is difficult to explain it, and it is generally not the roads that have been worked on for years and are becoming increasingly better. I put it down to the tendency for Israelis to take risks, to go faster than is safe, to beat the odds. I think this is also a Jewish trait. One correlation is the tendency for Jews to take risks in business, to establish companies that might fail. Japanese and Germans are well known to be risk-averse, and Americans are much more likely to be prepared to take risks, and particualrly Jews. So it is a double-edged sword, taking risks makes Israelis good soldiers, but bad drivers.
The current economic crisis has been exacerbated by the failure of an illegal "Ponzi" scheme by Bernard Madoff, head of an investment firm that guaranteed a 12% profit, that turned out to be a fruad. He was taking from new investors to pay older ones. This type of scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, a New England man in the 1920s who defrauded many people in this way. The fact that Madoff is Jewish might lead to great anti-Semitism, but the fact is that also most of the victims who lost money in his scheme were Jewish, including many Jewish charities such as Yeshiva University, where he was in charge of investments! Hopefully he will go to jail, so unfortunately this tendencey to take risks can get Jews in a lot of trouble
posted by Jack Cohen at 4:51 PM
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