Flying into MUC, Bringing in My Personal AP... Please Mr. Custom's Man, Don't You Check My Bag

Okay, cute and snappy title, huh? And yes, it is a bit sarcastic. BUT, the sarcasm is actually directed at the situation, not Mr. Schwarzenegger.

For those of you few watch enthusiasts around the world who slept the last 48 hours, here's a quick link from the Guardian -

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/17/arnold-schwarzenegger-detained-munich-airport-over-luxury-watch

Courtesy of CNN.com (Arnold Schwarzenegger was held at Munich airport after failing to declare an expensive watch. Portions of this image were obscured by the source before CNN obtained it.)

Now let's dive right in, shall we? Essentially, Mr. Schwarzenegger was transiting through Munich Airport en route to Kitzbuhel, Austria where he was scheduled to auction off his AP watch with the proceeds to his climate crisis charity.

The statement from the customs folks in Germany was that Mr. Schwarzenegger failed to declare the watch, further that it was an "import", and thus subject to tax. Now this is a point that I am actually in agreement with. If the contention of the tax man is that because the watch was coming into the EU, and would be sold in the EU (albeit for altruistic reasons)

and would therefore be taxable, then fair enough. 

But where (from my naive, American perspective) things got a little goofy was the stern statement from the customs office as cited from the Guardian's article:

A customs spokesperson told Sueddeutsche Zeitung: “If the goods remain in the EU, you have to declare them through customs. This applies to everyone, whether their name is Schwarzenegger or Müller, Meier, Huber.”

Not really sure what the snark from the customs spokesperson was in aid of, because by all accounts, Mr. Schwarzenegger cooperated completely, did not make a fuss or pitch a fit even though the efforts to collect the pre-payment of taxes and fines went more than a bit sideways...

Per CNN's coverage:

The actor agreed to pre-pay potential taxes on the watch and the officers failed to use a credit card machine for an hour until they gave up and brought him to a bank and asked him to withdraw cash from an ATM to pay, according to the source. The ATM they brought him to had a limit too low and the bank was closed.

When he returned, a new officer brought a new credit card machine that worked, the source added.

Now by and large, I am a rule follower. And I understand and respect that when we travel, we are guests in someone else's home. I also understand that many of my European colleagues have one mode of behavior at home, and a different one when abroad - as do we all, I suspect. 

So we've all learned something... maybe... 

We will likely never fully know the nuance or even letter of the law of ever country we may visit, but when it comes to watches, probably best to simply wear a Swatch and avoid the headaches.

Enjoy your watches...at home ; )

Doing Good! Something Bolder...

Introducing Bolder Watches -

Courtesy of Bolder Watches

This is a very, very quick introduction to a very, very cool idea!  We love charitable actions here at Tempus Fugit, and here is something new to add to the list!

Bolder offers a very well thought out design, at a very aggressive price point - WITH a charitable component to (if I have understood it correctly) to benefit the work of Save the Children.

When you order your watch, you are presented with the following options:

Choose Where Our Profit Goes*   

 

You then make the determination of what percentage of profit goes to benefit Save The Children:

 

10%

25%

50%

75%

90%

100% 

 

Stay tuned, there is more about this to come!

An Interesting Proposal from Horage

You might be forgiven if you have not heard of the folks at Horage.  They are a small, not terribly flashy outfit that are making interesting watches.  But they are doing something more, and that is why I am writing about them this morning.

One of the model families is the Omnium -

Courtesy of Horage

Horage has been quietly doing something very positive for people in need, who will likely never be customers.

I will be checking them out next Saturday at NYC's Wind Up event and hopefully will have a much more in-depth story for you and the charitable work that Horage are working to support.  But for now here is an example of one of their efforts to support some people with a hand up.

In 2009 they created a limited edition of 35 pieces with the intention of donating a significant amount of the proceeds to a charitable program in Bangladesh.

Here's part of the story, in their own words -

2009~ / BANGLADESH& Prof. Muhammad Ibrahim

2009:
35 Omnium (18K gold) – special edition dedicated to Bangladesh. Donation of the fund to CMES* for higher level of education of Bengal students *: Centre for Mass Education in Science.

Can science help to make the world a better place? 

You might expect to find an answer to this profound question perhaps in one of the top level universities in Europe or the US. I have made my very own findings in a country which I had previously only heard about in relation to there massive flooding or kids labour. 

Bangladesh! 

Thanks to our Onmium concept of randomly selecting countries every year in order to deal with the country, its people, the problems and the chances, we were not driven by pleasurable sensation of today’s world wide news broadcasters. We accidentally drew Bangladesh in our first annual event ever at Basel trade show. And from this point the journey with and into this country began. 

Known as one of the poorest countries in the world, where kids probably have knitted together some of the shirts I own; very densely populated, with 170 million people squeezed into a country around the size of Germany: this is what most of us know about the scary side of the country. 

But we have also heard about a Nobel Prize winner who invented micro credits, a poor country which misses out the era of the land line and goes directly into the cell phone world. Rice fields, floods and cell phones used by farmers to trade rice? Hmm, this is getting interesting. Then we started to dig into this country’s socio economic structure, to figure out if there are people in this country who work on the root problem of all our societies – lack of education! 

And we found somebody who matched our profile, Ibrahim Yunus, a physicist teaching science at Dhaka University. But this is only one of the parts of his life. Studying in England decades ago, he was involved in the fight for independence when Bangladesh separated from the far distant Pakistan and became an independent nation. Ibrahim told us that this was an exciting time, driven by students. But the biggest problem in this so-called revolution was that the participants involved had no real clue how to build the complex infrastructure needed to run an independent state. Perhaps this can be compared to the control vacuum we see at the moment in the Middle East. Anyhow, Bangladesh became an independent state with no infrastructure, or at best an infrastructure based on corruption. And of course the poorest of the poor are the ones who benefit least in such a country. 

So it became his mission to give the poorest of the poor the possibility to participate in education and work their way out of poverty. But Ibrahim chose a very scientific approach naturally driven by his profession in science. Ibrahim observed that it is important, even for the poorest and youngest, to understand the basics of how our world works, to argue against their parents who are often driven by religious beliefs. And he recognized that parents wouldn’t send their kids to his school if, at the same time, they could be working in a sewing factory earning money for the family. Of course there are many other factors to consider but I think these are the two main pillars on which Ibrahim built the CMES (Center for Mass Education in Science), the largest non-governmental schooling system helping the drop-outs to get back into the society. 

But what has science to do with kids labour. 
Simple: 
Kids do work half a day in the CMES, so they can earn their food, create products for the CMES shops and in return the kids are paid part of the profits so they do not come home empty-handed. But in order to get work there, they need to stay in the afternoon to get proper education through the educational system of the CMES. Sounds like a deal! The products they produce are fertilizers, mushrooms, toilets, pottery, clothes and many other things, things which can on the one hand be sold and on the other hand require some kind of science to succeed. In their school of course they learn writing and reading, but also how the world ticks. For example, I have seen a teacher with little 5 year olds sitting in a barn searching with a magnet for iron particles in the sand which they have brought up from the river. A simple but very effective way to understand where this expensive iron comes from. Such ideas and many more, Ibrahim and his team have developed to make this CMES model work. And it is a great success, a self-sufficient school system fully based on logic and a passion for making the world a better place. 

Today CMES runs 400 schools with teachers all recruited out of their own schooling system and they have more than 20.000 pupils. 
Being in this place is like being in a different world rather than in one of the poorest countries. 

By the way, Ibrahim in Bangladesh is the brother of the Nobel Prize winner and they seem to be something like rock stars in Bangladesh. At least that’s what it felt like when we made a sightseeing tour through Dhaka; once people realised that this is Ibrahim, the person they know from TV shows and the radio, the cell phones popped up to make pictures non-stop. 

But it is not only the status of the CMES which makes him an extraordinary person. It is the curiosity of a scientist, one who is in fact more a scientific philosopher, with whom you can get into a very intensive, exciting and enduring discussion about everything, which makes this world and its inhabitants tick. 

But why are we working with him? Not to fund more schools which they already have! We agreed with Ibrahim that it is necessary to try to give some of the bright kids who come out of the CMES a chance to receive even higher education, because this is where his organization stops. So Ibrahim told us that if we donated 1500 CHF, he would be able to send one person for graduation to university. And higher education for the poor is perhaps the only chance this country has to stabilize its organization. 

So, in our case, Luxury is being redirected straight into young potential which later could help to improve Bangladeshi society. 

GIRARD-PERREGAUX Partners for KOBE BRYANT Charity Efforts

On Sunday, April 22^nd Girard-Perregaux partnered with the Kobe and Vanessa Bryant Family Foundation, where Kobe and Vanessa hosted an intimate fundraising event at the home of one of the foundation’s board members in Los Angeles to support the organization, which is dedicated to improving the lives of youth and families in need.

Courtesy of Girard-Perregaux

Over 60 guests including Cindy Crawford, Rande Gerber, Jo Champa, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers and more attended and participated in a live auction with Andrea Fiuczynski from Christie’s. All proceeds will benefit the foundation. All six board members attended, including Kobe and Vanessa Bryant, Karyn Silver, Carol Cheng-Meyer, Aileen Getty and Patrick Soon-Shiong. 

Included in the auction was a custom Girard-Perregaux WW.TC Shadow timepiece, identical to the one worn by Bryant that evening. His timepiece is engraved with his initials and jersey number.