Kidnapped... NOT

I realized I haven't posted anything for a week plus. Not that I have nothing to post about but I am just feeling very sick and tired. Sick and tired of...

• The blatant lie - The Copper Within (Heavy Metal Poisoning): Someone please stop them from running that commercial. Please. It's a lie.
  
• Life in general - Maybe it's the holidays that's leaving me feeling so empty. Or maybe it's just the smell of the haze.
  
• Biases - Come on people! Show some dignity. No (super duper) short skirts for your driving tests and may the instructors who show bias get conjunctivitis.
  
• My incompetency
• Gathering data for statistics project - Gawd, I swear I will do the random surveys that pop up in my emails everyday from today onwards.
• Free riders - I haven't encountered any free riders for this semester yet but my friends have. And it is definitely no pony ride in the amusement park.
  
• The comment system - Mind bogging. Can't you just work already? -_- I'm lazy to try to track down which part of you is wrong.
  

Argh.

Overwhelming

Warning: Short Random Rambling Post

I can't recall where I read this but I remember the recent stats saying Singapore has about a 30% to 70% ratio for Foreigners to Singaporeans. (Because I am so lazy to check out the latest statistics, I will just go with that). ANYWAY, 30/70?! Jeeez... that's what I call an overrun. Lol.

I don't want to be jailed for creating racial/foreign dissent or anything but c'mon, doesn't anyone feel strange going out to a place in Singapore (e.g. Boon Lay) then realizing the whole place feels more like Mumbai? Feels so much like home doesn't it?

Helps economic development? Yes, I agree. But the right thing to do? I'm not so sure.

80/20 here we come. Lol

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On a side note, anytime you can see the word sextillion (The number that is represented as a one followed by 21 zeros) while talking about inflation, you know it's overwhelmingly bad.

Marriage and the City

Interesting email about a seminar out of the many many many that I receive per day. Quite the irony that there's so many seminars and yet so little students have time to attend them.

Topic: Marriage and the City

Abstract
Do people move to cities because of marriage market considerations? In cities singles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas. Singles are therefore prepared to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices. Once married, the marriage market benefits disappear while the housing premium remains. We extend the model of Burdett and Coles (1997) with a distinction between efficient (cities) and less efficient (non-cities) search markets. One implication of the model is that singles are more likely to move from rural areas to cities while married couples are more likely to make the reverse movement. A second prediction of the model is that attractive singles benefit most from a dense market (i.e. from being choosy). Those predictions are tested with a unique Danish dataset.

Presenters: Professor Pieter GAUTIER
Free University Amsterdam

Warning: Blabbering ahead (courtesy of sleeping too little because of school) Obviously the model probably doesn't apply much to a country that's as small as Singapore. But if we force-feed the theory... people get married and move to less populated areas like Punggol while the young single people would love the crowded areas more? Well, the young people in Singapore don't live out alone (so exp) but if you realized, I think they hit the town (Orchard) much more often than the married people. Hmm... blabber blabber.

(And I'm lazy to solve my comments box problem. I tried it yesterday and I totally got screwed by it. Doesn't work doesn't work doesn't)

Teletubby

Wikipedia: Tele- is a Greek prefix meaning "distant".

Telephone: Talking over distance
Television: Watching something over distance
Teleport: Travel over distance
Telekinesis: Ability to move something while maintaining distance

Teletubby?!

Jeez. I wonder what the creators of Teletubby were thinking about when they came up with this name.

Ponzi!

People shout 'Banzai!' and I shout 'Ponzi!'

I don't want to be evil but I would be lying if I tell you that I'm not gloating over how this whole Sunshine Empire saga ended.

Perhaps because I've had quite a couple of friends/idiots who have tried dragging me into the MLM. A true MLM can never work. And the closest thing to MLM that has ever work is the insurance company and even in that setting, much unethical behavior has rumored to have occured.

What really amuses/saddens me is how people somewhat lie to themselves to believe in this ol' so big dream which at the end of the day is just a big plain lie.

"Sunshine Empire is going to get you 700% returns over the next 8 years". Jeeez, these people really believe that? The really well managed equity funds, on good years, might land you near 20% per year (400% over 8 years) at the most. Not to mention they suck tons of commissions. 700% over 8 years? A bit hard I say.

=(

Great Words

Adam Smith's great words from the great book of 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations':

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it...he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Self-interest or selfish? Or is there even a difference? Either way, that is the driver of capitalism and all economies and I'm not sure if that is really a bad thing.

I'm not sure if the non-economistic people will be as impressed as I am, but I'm in pure awe every time after I read it regardless of how many times I had read it before. Who would had thought of things that way? Adam Smith and his invisible hand is as impressive to me as Einstein and his theory of light, if not even more.

Bad Bus

Grrr.... I boarded this bus packed with secondary school students in the afternoon. Noisy, noisy and noisy. And seriously, can't we have any legislation that mandates everyone uses their earphones in public places as opposed to letting people blast their music out aloud everywhere? I'm going to break if I ever hear any more of that Para Para Techno shit coming from the school kids' handphones again.

-_-"