Swine flu is so bad, even the cardboard figures are frightened
(Singapore Airlines Service Center - The Atrium @ Orchard 4th floor)
Monday, 29 June 2009
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Stop Preaching for Financial Independence
A call to all supporters of financial independence: please stop preaching -- you’ll endanger your own hope of financial independence, or even compromise your current state of financial independence. Why am I saying this? I strongly believe that financial independence will only be sustainable if a small portion of the population achieve it and actually rely on their passive income for their daily lives, while the majority of the population work very hard and spend a majority of their income while saving only a small portion of it so that they won’t be a burden to the society once they’ve passed their productive years. When somebody exercises their financial independence thus he/she is actually taking an early retirement -- we’re already facing issues of aging populations in many developed nations, and early retirees will just add burden to the economy.
Why is this so? Firstly, financial independence is based on the idea of sustenance from investments. This may be investments of financial assets (returns from stocks, bonds, etc), physical assets (yield from leasing out apartments, houses, or land), or even intellectual property rights (royalty payments from music, books, or patents). Essentially the idea is to get your assets work for you while you’re doing practically nothing (or doing something that you really like that perhaps are of no value to anyone else). Well, guess what, your assets won’t work by itself without other people working for it. Stocks won’t go up by itself -- the employees of the companies which issues the stocks will have to work to provide real value and then provide your dividends and drive the stock price up. Nobody will rent your apartment and pay you for it if they couldn’t make money by having real jobs that require them to live in your apartments. Similarly a large part of those who buy your music are not musicians themselves and will need to generate their money by doing other things -- not to mention that music tends to get obsolete fairly quickly and sales will decline with it.
I have this small analogy to illustrate this. Suppose that you live in a small country that is essentially a large orange farm. The country creates value by selling a large part of the oranges to their own citizens and a small part overseas. For the sake of the example, let’s say that everybody eats oranges in that country and that it satisfies all of the people’s dietary needs and all other services (banking, medical, etc) are paid for by the salary from the orange farm workers. There are the workers of the orange farm and there are land owners of the orange farm -- most of the revenue gained from the orange sales are kept by the land owners and a small portion are paid to the farm workers (similar to what happens in a lot of modern corporations). Suppose that some of the orange farm workers want to achieve financial independence and thus saves up a major part of his salary to be able to buy a patch of land to grow oranges so that they can enjoy the rest of their days relaxing while people works for him growing oranges. Now that these farm workers have become farm owners and thus inspires other farm workers to follow their paths. A few decades later, a lot of the farm workers have become farm owners and thus having difficulties in finding workers to work in their farm. Farm wages have gone up due to scarcity and sales is down since most of the citizens already grow their oranges and won’t buy from others. Selling overseas is not too profitable since shipping costs are high and a lot of the shipping workers have transitioned to become orange farm owners. Suddenly a lot of the farm owners realize that it is not profitable any more to own an orange farm and have lost their financial independence.
So again a call to all bloggers, supporters, and proponents of financial independence: please keep quiet for the sake of all of us. Respect those who are still caught in the rat race -- they are actually working for you indirectly. Respect those who spend a large portion of the salary traveling around the world or buying expensive cars and dining in fancy restaurants. As long as they don’t use debt to spend it, it is okay. Even a relatively small portion of debt is fine as long as it is kept low and doesn’t become bad debt (which will adversely affect us investors). These people are working for us and each worker who got bitten by the financial independence bug means one less worker that can support our financially independent life.
Why is this so? Firstly, financial independence is based on the idea of sustenance from investments. This may be investments of financial assets (returns from stocks, bonds, etc), physical assets (yield from leasing out apartments, houses, or land), or even intellectual property rights (royalty payments from music, books, or patents). Essentially the idea is to get your assets work for you while you’re doing practically nothing (or doing something that you really like that perhaps are of no value to anyone else). Well, guess what, your assets won’t work by itself without other people working for it. Stocks won’t go up by itself -- the employees of the companies which issues the stocks will have to work to provide real value and then provide your dividends and drive the stock price up. Nobody will rent your apartment and pay you for it if they couldn’t make money by having real jobs that require them to live in your apartments. Similarly a large part of those who buy your music are not musicians themselves and will need to generate their money by doing other things -- not to mention that music tends to get obsolete fairly quickly and sales will decline with it.
I have this small analogy to illustrate this. Suppose that you live in a small country that is essentially a large orange farm. The country creates value by selling a large part of the oranges to their own citizens and a small part overseas. For the sake of the example, let’s say that everybody eats oranges in that country and that it satisfies all of the people’s dietary needs and all other services (banking, medical, etc) are paid for by the salary from the orange farm workers. There are the workers of the orange farm and there are land owners of the orange farm -- most of the revenue gained from the orange sales are kept by the land owners and a small portion are paid to the farm workers (similar to what happens in a lot of modern corporations). Suppose that some of the orange farm workers want to achieve financial independence and thus saves up a major part of his salary to be able to buy a patch of land to grow oranges so that they can enjoy the rest of their days relaxing while people works for him growing oranges. Now that these farm workers have become farm owners and thus inspires other farm workers to follow their paths. A few decades later, a lot of the farm workers have become farm owners and thus having difficulties in finding workers to work in their farm. Farm wages have gone up due to scarcity and sales is down since most of the citizens already grow their oranges and won’t buy from others. Selling overseas is not too profitable since shipping costs are high and a lot of the shipping workers have transitioned to become orange farm owners. Suddenly a lot of the farm owners realize that it is not profitable any more to own an orange farm and have lost their financial independence.
So again a call to all bloggers, supporters, and proponents of financial independence: please keep quiet for the sake of all of us. Respect those who are still caught in the rat race -- they are actually working for you indirectly. Respect those who spend a large portion of the salary traveling around the world or buying expensive cars and dining in fancy restaurants. As long as they don’t use debt to spend it, it is okay. Even a relatively small portion of debt is fine as long as it is kept low and doesn’t become bad debt (which will adversely affect us investors). These people are working for us and each worker who got bitten by the financial independence bug means one less worker that can support our financially independent life.
Saturday, 16 May 2009
How to setup Singapore M1 Internet with Mac OS X Leopard
- Install drivers for the Huawei E220 Modem (Instructions from Tech Thought - Huawei's Drivers page)
- In System Preferences, under the Huawei Mobile modem in the Advanced configuration, configure the modem as the following:
Vendor: Generic
Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
APN: sunsurf - It's all set and good to go.
In case it still doesn't work, try setting these options in the Huawei Modem configuration:
Dial number: *99#
User ID: ppp@aplus.at
Password: ppp
Saturday, 25 April 2009
Mac vs Linux Performance
Michael Larabel has written a very thorough benchmark comparing Mac OS X "Leopard" with Ubuntu Linux "Intrepid Ibex" 8.10 -- both tests are done on the same machine, which is an Intel Mac Mini. For those who are too lazy to read, here's a summary:
- Linux is slightly faster at crunching numbers.
- Linux is a lot faster in compiling programs.
- Mac OS X is a lot faster in graphics.
- Mac OS X is considerably faster in disk operations.
Whereas since Mac have been traditionally been "user-centric" and have a long history with the publishing industry then probably Apple have invested more efforts in optimizing graphics. Of course they also produce their own hardware and thus are able to concentrate optimizing their drivers only on a relatively few variations of graphics adapters. Video editing is also one of the Mac's niche which explains the better disk performance since video editing involves seeking and chopping very large files. Remember that Steve Jobs used to own Pixar and the company still have a strong relationship with Apple -- hence probably the improvements are there to cater Pixar (interactive scene editing and generation with Macs and then batch-submit to a Linux-based, faceless, render farm?).
The differing driving forces between the two also shows why Linux haven't got much traction in the desktop space, even after almost 20 years since its birth (Linux 0.02 was released in 1991). In contrast Mac OS X is only about eight years old (first release of Mac OS 10.0 "Cheetah" was in 2001). On the other hand, the server edition of Mac OS X haven't gained much traction either. Its interesting to note that both have strong Unix legacy and the latter is even Unix certified.
Friday, 10 April 2009
The economy is a pyramid structure
The economy is a pyramid structure of workers in which the more affluent workers are supported by the workers who makes less money and thus have less to spend. Those who have money normally buys the products and services of those who are not as fortunate whereas the former get their money by servicing those who are wealthier than them. The very bottom of the pyramid are the likes of sweatshop workers making 5¢ sandals in China or farmer-workers (those who doesn’t even own the land that they work) growing rice in rural Indonesia. The next layers are probably the various kinds of office workers pushing pens or massaging keyboards. Finally the top of the pyramid consists of those folks you regularly see in the world’s top 500-ish richest people in the world.
It’s roughly similar to the “food chain” metaphor (or more appropriately food pyramid) in which the plants are eaten by herbivores which in turn are food for the carnivores. Furthermore the population of plants must be greater than the population of herbivores and in turn the carnivores’ population are limited by the number of herbivores they can eat to survive. If this is not the case then the pyramid will become imbalanced and hunger will cause the population’s proportions to be re-adjusted.
For example, I’m typing this article on a MacBook Pro -- which is a not-cheap laptop by most standards (unless probably the standards of those above Obama’s $200K per annum “rich” line). This fine laptop is assembled by relatively elite factory workers in China (relatively elite since probably Apple doesn’t contract sweatshops to make their stuff) that are supposedly more well-off than most other factory workers in the region. But probably they won’t be able to buy the laptops that they make from retail just by using their own salary (should they don’t have any employee’s discount) and thus probably buy cheaper knock-offs or DIY computers that are assembled by actual sweatshops. Which in turn those sweatshop workers probably won’t be able to buy the stuff they make themselves.
Enough for looking downwards, let’s look at the other direction now. I currently work as an IT support in an investment bank. We make and sell bonds and other investment products to big businesses and high net-worth individuals (those worth more than one million dollars). Since those bonds are primarily sold in at least a million dollar denomination (US dollars, not Zimbabwe dollars), I couldn’t afford to buy even one such bond with my current salary. I can only buy cheaper investment products (with lower returns) that other companies sell. Hey, that’s pretty similar to the Apple factory worker discussed earlier.
Interestingly enough, the size of your salary isn’t really determined by how difficult (or challenging, depending on your point of view) your job is but more tied to how much money your company is making and how much does it want to share it with you. Additionally how much other companies pay for a similar job matters too. You can be a code monkey in a highly profitable Fortune 500 company in New York making $100K+ annually or you can be the same code monkey in a dot-com startup in Jakarta making $2000 per year. Similarly the CEO in the former company probably makes millions of dollars per year but a CEO in the latter makes millions of rupiahs (the exchange rate at this time of writing is about 12K Rupiahs per USD) -- that’s a ten-thousand-times difference. If the pastures are green it’s not too difficult to grow your cattle.
Yes, life isn’t fair -- just live with it.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Saturday, 21 February 2009
Merrill Lynch after the Subprime
The Merril Lynch logo after the subprime effect. The statue on the right was commissioned in June 2008, sculpted by Anna C Spelling. I wonder whether the CEO knows about the real meaning of the bull's limping head.
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