Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Thursday, Dec 10, 2009 - 23:04 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Holidays Drag On

Alright, where to start? Some more badminton and swimming these few days. Michael Owen scores an improbable hat-trick against Wolfsburg (with United winning despite having nearly no defenders), reigniting his World Cup dreams, although as a Manchester United Number Seven I'm not sure why he bothers, as it'll probably end in tears.

Website of the day is TV Tropes, and frankly it's slightly worrying how many of the games/webcomics/manga/series I have encountered. One instance of a trope is the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, which covers why heroes always get matched up with baddies that are challenging but within their capacity to defeat (and improve themselves in the process)

Where else can one find a website that links such disparate themes like DotA, the Discworld, Civilization (the game), Adventure Quest, Eyeshield 21 and Monty Python, to name but a few? Ah yes, sigh, and the World of Ham, since Mr. Ham has a contract to appear in a set percentage of blog posts.


Tsk tsk, no regular flossing detected


Today's hamster care tip is on how to get gunk out from between your hamster's teeth. There is the hard way, but it can be traumatizing for (mostly) defenceless furballs. The more subtle way, recently discovered, is just to turn on the air conditioner and bore the (comfortable) hamster to sleep. One can then carefully pick at its pointies with a toothpick.

On home improvement, my uncle (a real handyman) recently repainted the whole house (tip: for a smooth surface, use brushes and not rollers), I dusted about a bit on sufferance, and got a new (springless) mattress. Found a bug with toes, but forgot to snap a photo of it before it was disposed of.

Mindful of the fact that I should be doing something towards my academic obligations, I got a 1TB external hard disk drive from Sim Lim Square, and proceeded to back up the sum total of my university files, as well as some other stuff, onto it (I've come some way from the days of 3.5 inch floppy disks, then the short-lived Iomega Zip drive, then writable CDs and DVDs). Hey, it had to be done some day.

Continued cycling through loans from the library. Tried more economics-type stuff, which can be summarized as follows:

  • 1001 Things They Won't Tell You - Some shady businesses are out to get consumers, and most businesses will charge consumers as much as they can get away with. Shock, horror!

  • 100 Minds That Made The Market - Work (very) hard, penny-pinch, drive hard bargains and wipe out competitors... and that's just the good guys.

    The scams that some of the rogues pulled reminded me of an old joke:

    Once, a well-dressed man went to a village with his assistant, and offered the people there ten dollars for each monkey they caught. The villagers had no idea what he wanted with the monkeys, but ten bucks was a good deal, and soon they had dozens of the chimps, which the man promptly paid for and left in a cage in the village square.

    The next day, the man offered fifteen dollars for each monkey, and more monkeys poured in. The third day, he offered twenty dollars, and by now the hills were running scarce of the creatures. Each time, the smiling man paid each villager in full for his catch.

    He then dropped a bombshell by declaring that he would be paying ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for each monkey when he got back next week, as he had to leave to attend to urgent business matters. One might only imagine the effect this had on the villagers.

    After the man had gone, however, his assistant, who had stayed behind to feed the monkeys, let it leak that he was willing to sell some of the caged monkeys back to the villagers at just fifty dollars each, so both he and the villagers could make a little extra on the side, wink wink.

    Now, the villagers fell over themselves in their haste to make a fifty dollar profit per (monkey) head, and emptied their savings, even borrowing if they had to, to purchase them. The assistant sold back all of the monkeys in a jiffy.

    And of course, neither the man nor his assistant were ever seen in the village again.

     Human nature doesn't really change, but at least scammers sometimes get their comeuppance too.

  • Fake Work - People often do stuff that doesn't need to be done (students had better be exempt). Spend a few days writing up a report each month, only to have it filtered into the wastepaper bin by the CEO's secretary? Hold daily meetings, which more or less go along the same lines? Compile a hefty best practices manual, which will end up gathering dust at the bottom of countless file cabinets? Live in the Dilbert universe?

    Congratulations, Fake Work has been done!

    Guest soundbite by FAKEBERT: "Simi cheem fakework, wayang say wayang lah. Deserve it, if got nothing to do but hum chee need the money dun dare to get fired then arrow here taichi there wayang lor, they think is conscription ah. If is me I just tell the boss, I know got no work, you know got no work, we just play Playstation. Eh wait, I *am* the boss."

    [N.B. One Amazon.com review suggests that the book itself is an example of Fake Work, since the 200-plus pages can be summarized adequately in ten - or as we have just seen, two paragraphs]

  • Poor Story - Africa is on average pretty poor, but some countries manage to be more screwed up than others and are near-hopeless basket cases, since any donations to them are inevitably siphoned off at some level of the corrupted bureaucracy (however, if donors just want that vague feel-good vibe, it probably doesn't matter where they throw their money at).

    The author illustrates the magnitude of the task by considering a fictitious African state that is the average of all African nations, and shows that even for a competent and well-meaning leader, there are simply not enough funds to go around. Build infrastructure? Maybe, if we divert resources from providing clean water. More education? Okay, cut military spending, and risk either invasion or more likely, a coup.

    And to think that half of Africa is worse off than this.

    The suggested approach is to consolidate efforts, so that well-meaning volunteers and aid agencies don't duplicate work, or worse, end up at odds with each other. Examples include raising a spanking new clinic, which stood empty since they hadn't budgeted for the wages of the medical staff, and building several modern bridges, only for the partners who were supposed to lay the roads fail to do so, leading to bridges to nowhere (not that rare).

And a few more books that did little to dissuade me from thinking that economists don't really know quite as much about the economy as they let on. History is littered with prominent economists who got their predictions (or policies, on hindsight) horribly, horribly wrong, but like football pundits, I doubt that anybody actually expects them to get it right much more than half the time (if they could, even for a short period, they would probably be fund managers).

Sounds like a great job to me, if one can get it.



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (4) - trackback url


Next: Au Naturel


Related Posts:
Economics Thus Far
We Are The Game (Short)
Algo Brüno Championleagueo
Mega Bonus Post
The End of Skill
Back to top




4 trackbacks

Trackback by Hack Jurassic Park Builder
Hack Jurassic Park Builder - [bert's blog]


June 13, 2014 - 11:57 SGT     
Trackback by 硬式用バット
硬式用バット - [bert's blog]


July 10, 2014 - 17:41 SGT     
Trackback by loa cheat
loa cheat - [bert's blog]


August 21, 2014 - 22:20 SGT     
Trackback by How to hack facebook accounts
How to hack facebook accounts - [bert's blog]


October 10, 2014 - 03:22 SGT     

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.