GM has a negative equity of $60 billion. I've never seen a listed company with negative equity before but it basically means that company, if bought is worth less than $0, yet some how the market capitalization for GM is $1.13 billion at it's current share price of $1.85.
So if someone bought out GM for $1.13 billion, you'd get $60 billion in debt. Sounds like a terrible deal to me. So here's my question, what do you do with a company that is so terribly in debt? You shut it down. Sad, but true.
I highly doubt that GM will ever make it back to profitability, or even have positive equity in this lifetime. Given the current economic climate we have now, I highly doubt that car sales will return in time to even give GM a chance.
So here's my play. I've decided to buy a few put options with a strike at $3 for $2. If GM goes broke, share price goes to zero, the contracts become exercisable and the underwriter is forced to buy @ $3.
We'll see what happens.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Terrible Analysis Should be a Crime
I've been following up on a lot of economic reports recently and I have to say that the quality of analysis being published on the internet is crap. Not just ordinary crap, but the kind of crap that might have come out of mutant cow that should've been shot in the first place.
Yeah, it's that bad and I am in a ranting mood.
Just having data doesn't make you intelligent
Sure, having data might make you *seem* intelligent, because it might imply that you did some "research" possibly leading to some interesting conclusion, but saying stupid things based on good data still doesn't change anything-- you'd still be an idiot.
I remember once I was listening to a commentator quote that once that the richest 10%, despite making about 90% of the wealth should be outraged because 10% of the population was paying 90% of the taxes. Hence progressive taxes are a bad thing-- we should have a flat tax instead.
For a second, he sounded intelligent. After I thought about it, he was a total idiot.
Suppose that we did have a flat tax. The people that made 90% of the wealth would pay 90% of the taxes by definition of a flat tax. Suppose that there were 11 people out there. 1 man that made $9 and 10 men that made $1 and everyone was taxed at 10%.
The total amount of money made was $10, so the government would get $1 out of it. Right? So let's figure out how much everyone paid!
The 1 rich guy paid $0.9, the 10 poor guys each paid $0.01 for a total of $0.1. The rich guy that made 90% of the money paid 90% of the taxes!
I am surprised that people with intellectual deficiencies this bad haven't been weeded out by natural selection because it takes talent to be this stupid!
Critical Analysis is Crucial
The ability to think critically is essential, because this directly relates a person's ability to put data into perspective. In other words, it's what gives meaning to data. Meaningless data is useless, the same goes for people that don't have critical thinking skills.
If you think I'm being harsh, well... the conversation would just have to end here... Heh.
Just being Critical doesn't Mean that you're Smart
Especially if you're wrong. We all know the loud mouthed critical dude that thinks he knows his stuff but is completely off the deep end. If you want an ounce of respect, you've gotta be right. Right in ways that are concrete and measurable.
Now that's the real test of intelligence.
It's tough being smart. Smart people know this and know when to shut up. The stupid ones don't.
Yeah, it's that bad and I am in a ranting mood.
Just having data doesn't make you intelligent
Sure, having data might make you *seem* intelligent, because it might imply that you did some "research" possibly leading to some interesting conclusion, but saying stupid things based on good data still doesn't change anything-- you'd still be an idiot.
I remember once I was listening to a commentator quote that once that the richest 10%, despite making about 90% of the wealth should be outraged because 10% of the population was paying 90% of the taxes. Hence progressive taxes are a bad thing-- we should have a flat tax instead.
For a second, he sounded intelligent. After I thought about it, he was a total idiot.
Suppose that we did have a flat tax. The people that made 90% of the wealth would pay 90% of the taxes by definition of a flat tax. Suppose that there were 11 people out there. 1 man that made $9 and 10 men that made $1 and everyone was taxed at 10%.
The total amount of money made was $10, so the government would get $1 out of it. Right? So let's figure out how much everyone paid!
The 1 rich guy paid $0.9, the 10 poor guys each paid $0.01 for a total of $0.1. The rich guy that made 90% of the money paid 90% of the taxes!
I am surprised that people with intellectual deficiencies this bad haven't been weeded out by natural selection because it takes talent to be this stupid!
Critical Analysis is Crucial
The ability to think critically is essential, because this directly relates a person's ability to put data into perspective. In other words, it's what gives meaning to data. Meaningless data is useless, the same goes for people that don't have critical thinking skills.
If you think I'm being harsh, well... the conversation would just have to end here... Heh.
Just being Critical doesn't Mean that you're Smart
Especially if you're wrong. We all know the loud mouthed critical dude that thinks he knows his stuff but is completely off the deep end. If you want an ounce of respect, you've gotta be right. Right in ways that are concrete and measurable.
Now that's the real test of intelligence.
It's tough being smart. Smart people know this and know when to shut up. The stupid ones don't.
Outsourcing done the wrong way
I mentioned earlier that my project group is having a $100,000 machine custom built and delivered for our research work. My research team has decided to put me as the guy that deals with the details of getting the machine working. The hardware setup had been finally completed the machine has been moved into our labs.
The stupid thing is that the people that built the machine haven't been on time with the software, not a single line of code written and the thing is even written labview for crying out loud. And some how, having the control software is costing us $20~$30k to write and they plan to do it in a week. I could do that kind of work in a heartbeat and I've done it before too on a different machine.
So here's the deal, one day at work, my supervisor was off on a business trip for several days and to kill time, I decided to write software to automate one of the experiments we do. Basically, what people used to do was take data every hour for some experiment. The experiment would generally run for as long as someone was at work. What I did is automate the process, I managed to figure out the code and write the entire software in 3 days and now we run data logging experiments for 72 hours instead of just 8 like we used to do.
The guys we've contracted to do the same job are sending in 2 guys and need a week to do it. Seriously, I can do what they do in half the time and half the man power.
I shake my head at this whole thing. The point of outsourcing is to *save* money! Well there you have it... if you want to get rich, be a contractor! Working for big corporations is like taking candy from a baby.
The stupid thing is that the people that built the machine haven't been on time with the software, not a single line of code written and the thing is even written labview for crying out loud. And some how, having the control software is costing us $20~$30k to write and they plan to do it in a week. I could do that kind of work in a heartbeat and I've done it before too on a different machine.
So here's the deal, one day at work, my supervisor was off on a business trip for several days and to kill time, I decided to write software to automate one of the experiments we do. Basically, what people used to do was take data every hour for some experiment. The experiment would generally run for as long as someone was at work. What I did is automate the process, I managed to figure out the code and write the entire software in 3 days and now we run data logging experiments for 72 hours instead of just 8 like we used to do.
The guys we've contracted to do the same job are sending in 2 guys and need a week to do it. Seriously, I can do what they do in half the time and half the man power.
I shake my head at this whole thing. The point of outsourcing is to *save* money! Well there you have it... if you want to get rich, be a contractor! Working for big corporations is like taking candy from a baby.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Almost One Year
It's almost one year since I started working in Japan doing R&D work. I'd have to say that time most certainly flies, that of course might imply that I've been having fun. To a degree, I'd have to say most definitely yes, but I'd have to say that most of my fun isn't work related, but I digress.
A few days ago, I form was sent out to me and to the other new recruits to prepare a form as a sort of a review of their work place, what the environment is like, what we do, personal satisfaction with the job and any other sort of comments that might help us do our job better.
The form needs to be submitted next week and the new recruits are going get together for some kind of meeting with the HR people. So I am going to take this time to write my own review of the year to help me put things into perspective.
The Environment
As far as it comes to working environments, my work place is pretty lax. I don't find myself super bogged down with work nor do I find myself working crazy hours or overtime which is stereotypical with Japanese work culture. I do, however put in about 1 hour of overtime everyday to try and get some extra pocket cash since base salary for new hires are pretty low as it would be nice to have a little extra spending cash for if/when I need it.
The People
The people are generally nice and I am fortunate to be in a fairly friendly team as we like to joke around from time to time while working. There are other small subteams in the group which aren't as lively so I am rather happy about that.
But having a little fun aside, I think there are some communication issues in the sense that there isn't a lot of it happening. I find the people in my team to be kind of in their own little world when it comes to work. I hardly hear from other people about what they really are doing aside from the things presented in the meetings (and simply attending meetings to learn is a terrible way to learn).
I also find that people tend to be quite unresponsive when it comes to new ideas. I've made some presentations on some ideas about what might be nice from time to time but usually it ends into either "we'll look into it" or "ok that seems interesting" and ends at that. For a company that is supposed to be about technological innovation, just passing up ideas or not acting on them is a sign of creative death. It also shows from the kinds of products they've been recently putting out... all of them are totally behind when it comes to the technological revolution curve.
On job satisfaction
Job satisfaction for me is directly related to the amount of inspiration I can derive from my work. Unfortunatly, I am not at all inspired by my work. After condisering what I do and what we are making, I don't see it as a leap forward in technology and at the same time, I am not finding a lot of interesting new ways of doing my job because I need to find a way to make time and get resources to do what I want to do (hence forth I am working on becoming very good with very cheap resources).
The other problem is sort of a lack of fresh and beautiful ideas. I've spoken with people from time to time and I don't feel a vibe of creative energy or vision. It kind of sucks when I have a lot of things that I want to try or do and have no one to talk with about it... or no good source of interesting ideas.
The company is a big place and there are probably lots of people that I haven't met yet that might be really interesting people. But from the people I've met so far, I don't know; something is missing.
A few days ago, I form was sent out to me and to the other new recruits to prepare a form as a sort of a review of their work place, what the environment is like, what we do, personal satisfaction with the job and any other sort of comments that might help us do our job better.
The form needs to be submitted next week and the new recruits are going get together for some kind of meeting with the HR people. So I am going to take this time to write my own review of the year to help me put things into perspective.
The Environment
As far as it comes to working environments, my work place is pretty lax. I don't find myself super bogged down with work nor do I find myself working crazy hours or overtime which is stereotypical with Japanese work culture. I do, however put in about 1 hour of overtime everyday to try and get some extra pocket cash since base salary for new hires are pretty low as it would be nice to have a little extra spending cash for if/when I need it.
The People
The people are generally nice and I am fortunate to be in a fairly friendly team as we like to joke around from time to time while working. There are other small subteams in the group which aren't as lively so I am rather happy about that.
But having a little fun aside, I think there are some communication issues in the sense that there isn't a lot of it happening. I find the people in my team to be kind of in their own little world when it comes to work. I hardly hear from other people about what they really are doing aside from the things presented in the meetings (and simply attending meetings to learn is a terrible way to learn).
I also find that people tend to be quite unresponsive when it comes to new ideas. I've made some presentations on some ideas about what might be nice from time to time but usually it ends into either "we'll look into it" or "ok that seems interesting" and ends at that. For a company that is supposed to be about technological innovation, just passing up ideas or not acting on them is a sign of creative death. It also shows from the kinds of products they've been recently putting out... all of them are totally behind when it comes to the technological revolution curve.
On job satisfaction
Job satisfaction for me is directly related to the amount of inspiration I can derive from my work. Unfortunatly, I am not at all inspired by my work. After condisering what I do and what we are making, I don't see it as a leap forward in technology and at the same time, I am not finding a lot of interesting new ways of doing my job because I need to find a way to make time and get resources to do what I want to do (hence forth I am working on becoming very good with very cheap resources).
The other problem is sort of a lack of fresh and beautiful ideas. I've spoken with people from time to time and I don't feel a vibe of creative energy or vision. It kind of sucks when I have a lot of things that I want to try or do and have no one to talk with about it... or no good source of interesting ideas.
The company is a big place and there are probably lots of people that I haven't met yet that might be really interesting people. But from the people I've met so far, I don't know; something is missing.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
And now the US Republicans care about inflation!?
Politics generally make me sick, because it's usually about chest thumping and making one's self look good and by pretending to care about constituents when it's really about caring for their own asses.
I saw a youtube clip today of republican Dan Burton complaining about the devaluation of the US dollar and how he managed to get contacted by some Chinese representative that they were worried about the devaluation of treasury bonds they held.
How else should I put it other than that this one terribly big bullshit act.
A Sense of Perspective
Let me be blunt. It was the Republican government that put the US into a huge debt into the first place by the Iraq war and then dishing out bailouts for the banks in when the financial crisis came out. And now that they have just lost the house to the Democrats that they want to complain about spending too much and the devaluation of the US dollar!?
Where were the calls for prudence when it came to deficit spending when the Republicans were in power? The only one Republican that cared dearly about excessive government spending was Ron Paul, who had little support from his colleagues when we was trying to reign in big deficit spending.
It makes me sick at how quickly some politicians change the tune of their song.
If politicians were paid in proportion to their level of approval, most of them would probably be broke.
I saw a youtube clip today of republican Dan Burton complaining about the devaluation of the US dollar and how he managed to get contacted by some Chinese representative that they were worried about the devaluation of treasury bonds they held.
How else should I put it other than that this one terribly big bullshit act.
A Sense of Perspective
Let me be blunt. It was the Republican government that put the US into a huge debt into the first place by the Iraq war and then dishing out bailouts for the banks in when the financial crisis came out. And now that they have just lost the house to the Democrats that they want to complain about spending too much and the devaluation of the US dollar!?
Where were the calls for prudence when it came to deficit spending when the Republicans were in power? The only one Republican that cared dearly about excessive government spending was Ron Paul, who had little support from his colleagues when we was trying to reign in big deficit spending.
It makes me sick at how quickly some politicians change the tune of their song.
If politicians were paid in proportion to their level of approval, most of them would probably be broke.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Scalable systems and businesses
If you want to make lots of money, learning about scalable systems and businesses are a must. Making a profitable business is one thing, but setting up a condition where your business can grow to an indefinite size is completely another problem, and often a very overlooked problem.
The biggest advancements in human productivity (and at the same time, wealth) has always involved the development of scalable systems. Starting from the development of the printing press, the industrial process and onwards to the information revoution, all of these are examples of the ability productivity and profits to an arbitrary large size. The only limiation preventing infinite scaling is demand.
The biggest businesses bringing in the biggest revenues are the ones that have scaled the most easily. The finance sector is perhaps the most easiest to scale as you don't really have to produce anything and profits come in from lending other people's money. Software is another good example with the birth of Microsoft as the technology to make copies of software is arbitrary small and disks and CDs being fairly easy to distribute. Finally, companies like Google and Amazon have been able to take advantage of the scalability of the internet to do business with arbitrary large numbers of people.
What can't be scaled, and revenues at the same time, are things that are directly limited to your capacity to produce or do something. In other words, it's highly unlikely that anyone living on the productivity of their own manual labor will become very rich.
Suppose that someone opened a small burger stall somewhere. The maximum amount of money a person making and selling burgers is generally limited by their individual capacity to produce burgers. Should they work in their position for their entire life, it is much less likely that they will be able to make large amounts of money.
Suppose now that the burger flipper is now able to hire people to flip burgers, and let's assume that the burgers this stall makes is exceptionally good that demand is very high. All he would have to do is hire sufficient numbers of people to make his trademark burgers thus scaling his output and revenues at the same time. None of this would be possible had he remained a cook his entire life.
The equation for the amount of money that you should be able to pull in should be:
total revenue = profitability*scalability
Now all you need to find is something that is both very profitable and scalable as a business.
The biggest advancements in human productivity (and at the same time, wealth) has always involved the development of scalable systems. Starting from the development of the printing press, the industrial process and onwards to the information revoution, all of these are examples of the ability productivity and profits to an arbitrary large size. The only limiation preventing infinite scaling is demand.
The biggest businesses bringing in the biggest revenues are the ones that have scaled the most easily. The finance sector is perhaps the most easiest to scale as you don't really have to produce anything and profits come in from lending other people's money. Software is another good example with the birth of Microsoft as the technology to make copies of software is arbitrary small and disks and CDs being fairly easy to distribute. Finally, companies like Google and Amazon have been able to take advantage of the scalability of the internet to do business with arbitrary large numbers of people.
What can't be scaled, and revenues at the same time, are things that are directly limited to your capacity to produce or do something. In other words, it's highly unlikely that anyone living on the productivity of their own manual labor will become very rich.
Suppose that someone opened a small burger stall somewhere. The maximum amount of money a person making and selling burgers is generally limited by their individual capacity to produce burgers. Should they work in their position for their entire life, it is much less likely that they will be able to make large amounts of money.
Suppose now that the burger flipper is now able to hire people to flip burgers, and let's assume that the burgers this stall makes is exceptionally good that demand is very high. All he would have to do is hire sufficient numbers of people to make his trademark burgers thus scaling his output and revenues at the same time. None of this would be possible had he remained a cook his entire life.
The equation for the amount of money that you should be able to pull in should be:
total revenue = profitability*scalability
Now all you need to find is something that is both very profitable and scalable as a business.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Unproductive
For the past 2 months, I've been rather unproductive. Unproductive in the sense that I haven't been doing anything worthy of having a positive or memorable impact upon myself. During the weekdays, I come home at about 7 pm (squeezing about 1.25 hours of overtime), whipping out some dinner while I surf the net or play computer games until about 10 pm. After that, I start scouring the net for economic data or reports (most of which are garbage) before it hits 11:30 pm here, which is perfectly the time when the NYSE opens and I watch what happens until about about 12:30 am before I goto bed.
On weekends, my days are usually filled with gatherings. Events that I mostly get invited out to and I oblige, usually heading out in the evenings to meet up with people whom I seem to meet only from time to time for dinner or drinks. Sometimes I meet some interesting people, but I only keep occasional contact with them. When it comes to meeting people, something seems markedly different from the experiences I've had in the past. Now that I look at it, the environment in which I meet people has changed rather drastically. But I'll talk about that in a different post.
Suffice to say, I haven't been doing anything of real significance lately and my time is being poorly spent.
Dealing with the Urge to do nothing
I have to say that I am fortunate that I live close to work. I can wake up at 8:20 and still check in by 8:59 after changing, eating breakfast, reading a little news and then brushing my teeth before a brisk paced walk from my room to the office. Compared to other people that have to commute by train and spend about 30-40 minutes a day on travel, I save at least a productive hour everyday. The only problem is that the only thing that I've found my self doing with it is goofing off and that is going to have to stop, and that is going to be thepoint of this post.
There are a variety of things that I would like to do but just end up having "no time for it". I'd have to say that having "no time" is a terrible excuse because I am quite sure that most people have time in general somewhere that can be allocated to doing something productive.
I do believe that people in general are programmed to operate on their urges. Whether be it determining when it's time to eat, sleep, watch TV and etc. The problem with I think is the programming of our urges, since being young-- most of us have not been trained or programmed while young to be self-productive, or perhaps have the urge to do things that have a positive impact on ourselves. Instead, I believe that most of us shun the work or effort required to be productive and squander it by finding ways of killing time, which seems to me to be a rather slow form of suicide-- killing time is like killing yourself; second by second.
I think that most of this poor mental programming comes from school, by some how learning that studying, work, exercising or activities that are supposed to be "good for you" is a chore. The problem with this is that it leaves a bitter taste of doing things that are "good for you" in one's mental mouth making people less inclined to be self-productive and find ways of avoiding such activities.
It is perhaps one of the reasons that entertainment has become such an important part of most people's lives; it becomes quite obvious from looking at my entertainment expenditures in my annual budget.
Hard work shouldn't be painful
I don't believe that hard work should be painful. But it seems to be the way people are taught to think about it; if you're working hard at something, then you're probably exerting a lot of will power doing something that you don't like. It is quite rare to find anyone hard at work at something they really like. Work has that kind of image, it's something that "pays the bills;" it's just something that helps keep you alive.
People generally should work hard on things that they enjoy. The other important thing that people should be able to do is work hard at things that have a direct positive impact on their lives. There is a reason people exercise, or study languages, build things and etc. And what causes people to do these things is motivation.
The unfortunate thing is that most motivation that encourages us to do these things are somehow related to pain. "Study or else you're not going to pass your test," or "Work your job or else you'll get fired" or something of that variety. It is something of a rather sad trait of our modern society.
I believe that a life is much better lived if motivations sounded like "I studied math because I thought it was interesting," or "I grow strawberries because I like their taste." It is far too rare for me to find people doing the things they want to do. And I think that is sad.
Wrong Obligations
I am starting to believe now that we've been taught to live by the wrong obligations; the idea that we have to be whipped into being educated to take up a job that we probably won't like so we take on the heavy burden buying a house and then raise children to do the same thing.
There is a better way of living and it's finding the things that you enjoy and having the freedom to pursue them. But the problem is that most people don't even have a chance to get there, because we've all been told that we've got to work hard at the things that we don't like to live a decent life.
Most people live this way because they know that they can survive doing this. The sad thing is that most people will likely never have the courage to take the risk to find a way to make a living doing something they enjoy. And I think that's the whole problem with it all, most people just can't find enough positive motivation to do something they really enjoy, because somehow we've setup too many mental barriers to do it.
I'm tired and I've flipped back through my post. I'm totally rambling. It's been too long since I've done a real post. I need to get back into it again.
On weekends, my days are usually filled with gatherings. Events that I mostly get invited out to and I oblige, usually heading out in the evenings to meet up with people whom I seem to meet only from time to time for dinner or drinks. Sometimes I meet some interesting people, but I only keep occasional contact with them. When it comes to meeting people, something seems markedly different from the experiences I've had in the past. Now that I look at it, the environment in which I meet people has changed rather drastically. But I'll talk about that in a different post.
Suffice to say, I haven't been doing anything of real significance lately and my time is being poorly spent.
Dealing with the Urge to do nothing
I have to say that I am fortunate that I live close to work. I can wake up at 8:20 and still check in by 8:59 after changing, eating breakfast, reading a little news and then brushing my teeth before a brisk paced walk from my room to the office. Compared to other people that have to commute by train and spend about 30-40 minutes a day on travel, I save at least a productive hour everyday. The only problem is that the only thing that I've found my self doing with it is goofing off and that is going to have to stop, and that is going to be thepoint of this post.
There are a variety of things that I would like to do but just end up having "no time for it". I'd have to say that having "no time" is a terrible excuse because I am quite sure that most people have time in general somewhere that can be allocated to doing something productive.
I do believe that people in general are programmed to operate on their urges. Whether be it determining when it's time to eat, sleep, watch TV and etc. The problem with I think is the programming of our urges, since being young-- most of us have not been trained or programmed while young to be self-productive, or perhaps have the urge to do things that have a positive impact on ourselves. Instead, I believe that most of us shun the work or effort required to be productive and squander it by finding ways of killing time, which seems to me to be a rather slow form of suicide-- killing time is like killing yourself; second by second.
I think that most of this poor mental programming comes from school, by some how learning that studying, work, exercising or activities that are supposed to be "good for you" is a chore. The problem with this is that it leaves a bitter taste of doing things that are "good for you" in one's mental mouth making people less inclined to be self-productive and find ways of avoiding such activities.
It is perhaps one of the reasons that entertainment has become such an important part of most people's lives; it becomes quite obvious from looking at my entertainment expenditures in my annual budget.
Hard work shouldn't be painful
I don't believe that hard work should be painful. But it seems to be the way people are taught to think about it; if you're working hard at something, then you're probably exerting a lot of will power doing something that you don't like. It is quite rare to find anyone hard at work at something they really like. Work has that kind of image, it's something that "pays the bills;" it's just something that helps keep you alive.
People generally should work hard on things that they enjoy. The other important thing that people should be able to do is work hard at things that have a direct positive impact on their lives. There is a reason people exercise, or study languages, build things and etc. And what causes people to do these things is motivation.
The unfortunate thing is that most motivation that encourages us to do these things are somehow related to pain. "Study or else you're not going to pass your test," or "Work your job or else you'll get fired" or something of that variety. It is something of a rather sad trait of our modern society.
I believe that a life is much better lived if motivations sounded like "I studied math because I thought it was interesting," or "I grow strawberries because I like their taste." It is far too rare for me to find people doing the things they want to do. And I think that is sad.
Wrong Obligations
I am starting to believe now that we've been taught to live by the wrong obligations; the idea that we have to be whipped into being educated to take up a job that we probably won't like so we take on the heavy burden buying a house and then raise children to do the same thing.
There is a better way of living and it's finding the things that you enjoy and having the freedom to pursue them. But the problem is that most people don't even have a chance to get there, because we've all been told that we've got to work hard at the things that we don't like to live a decent life.
Most people live this way because they know that they can survive doing this. The sad thing is that most people will likely never have the courage to take the risk to find a way to make a living doing something they enjoy. And I think that's the whole problem with it all, most people just can't find enough positive motivation to do something they really enjoy, because somehow we've setup too many mental barriers to do it.
I'm tired and I've flipped back through my post. I'm totally rambling. It's been too long since I've done a real post. I need to get back into it again.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Corporations: Where creative people go to die
I work in a large corporation. Those of you that know me know what that company is. It's been nearly a year since I've joined the company and so far the experience has been lukewarm.
Since joining the company, as sort of an "initiate" into this whole corporate world, most newly hired members have attended all sorts of little lectures from the HR group with huge dreams of us creating all sorts of new fangled technologies for the future. At the same time, I still remember the HR people, during our orientation that our relationship with the company was that they "pay us and we work for them." We might not like the job we do, or some of the people around us, but the contractual relationship is pretty much "do what we're told to." Sounded like a paid version of slavery to me.
And now, that I think about it all, the whole idea seems rather absurd. I know there are people within the company coming up with projects that will hopefully make large sums of cash, the reward structure is that you might get a promotion or a bonus.. somewhere in the ball park of $10,000 or more depending on the contribution. But seriously, why would you want to settle for $10,000 if you're coming up with a multi-million dollar idea? I don't see any really good incentives.
And with that happening. I also think working in an environment like this will cause creative people to eventually go brain dead. I for one firmly believe that believe that creativity cannot be fostered by forcing people to follow orders. Especially from older people that aren't as in touch with the latest technologies or where the direction of technology will be going. I don't believe that most higher ups have the youthful visions of the younger people when it comes to understanding the potentials of what we can do with technology.
It says a lot about why most of the hottest start ups and growing companies are or have been full of young people. Older people, especially normal managers usually just can't cut it with coming up a great idea. It seems to be that they latch on to whatever seems hot or a cool seeming idea of someone else and start whipping people to do their bidding. I think it is kind of rare to find a management level kind of person that truly understands the pulse technology and where might it go.
One must truly love what they do, understand what would be truly be great to have and understand the community of people that use these things to understand where things will go. I'd have to say that most management people don't understand... they're just being paid to have their underlings make somethings that'll turn a profit.
Usually for large corporations it means more of the same. Make things smaller or bigger, faster, cheaper whatever. It's all sort of a variation of the same thing. 30~40 years ago, I guess you could say that having corporations was a necessity, because it was pretty expensive to get things done. Things have changed and the up front capital to building something or even getting a startup up and running has gotten much cheaper and I think it is the small startups with the fresh ideas are the ones that are going to have the biggest impact on society.
Large corporations aren't places where people have new ideas. Atleast that it from what I've seen so far, no matter how the managers and HR people want people to be creative to come up with the new great hit. The working environment of a large corporation just doesn't encourage people to be creative or take chances.
You just can't be creative when you have a bunch of managers telling you what to do while at the same time having to do all sorts of stupid things to get an idea past a manager so that you can just try it. It just doesn't work that way.
Would you want to pay $100,000 or $1,000
You know the saying "nobody got fired for buying IBM," I now have an idea of what that really means.
To do some experimentation work, we're ordering a $100,000 machine, custom built from the ground up. We have some power supplies here, some data loggers there and a bunch of other high precision stuff that lets us connect some wires to samples and measure data. After going through 2~3 levels of management to get the funding that machine is getting built. The problem is that I believe that I can build something that can do the same thing and probably out spec the machine that is coming in for about $1,000.
Sure, I made a presentation and suggested the idea of my version of the machine to the leaders, but it gained no traction. One suggested that it might be too much trouble to build the thing on our own. I recognize that the circuits that I've built will need some fine tuning to get things into spec but I think it's something doable. It annoyed me considering that with the current economic situation that we are being told to slow down on what we spend our cash on. Hell I'd rather build the machine and sell it off to them and pocket the difference!
The thing is that out of the people in my work group, I am pretty much the only person that knows anything about designing circuits and making programs. This is totally up my ally. Instead, they make me take charge of farming out the work to an outside company which I have a feeling that I can outclass the engineers doing the electronics and programming. I can understand why people might think spending $100,000 on the machine that we are brining in is reasonable but it's people with the $1,000 idea that can blow this stuff out of the water is what revolutions are made out of.
I have no interest in trying to bash heads with management because sometimes I think they're off the deep end. I've tried once to change the culture of a laboratory but that plan was met with resistance and apathy.
It would be exactly like the engineers at Xerox first giving birth to the graphical user interface and the mouse and then having the management people have no clue what this all ment. Apple and Microsoft came swooping in and now this technology is everywhere. It's exactly like that. Xerox would most certainly be smacking themselves in the head now for letting something like this get away from them.
I've once read somewhere that even if you've got a great idea, you're going to have to ram it down the throats of management to get anything done... in that sense, people won't understand a good idea even if it smacks them in the face. Some people at first thought that Google was a stupid idea with Yahoo, Excite and all the other search engines out there. I'll let results speak for themselves.
So far what I've learned is that if you really want something done, you're going to have to rely on your self.
Since joining the company, as sort of an "initiate" into this whole corporate world, most newly hired members have attended all sorts of little lectures from the HR group with huge dreams of us creating all sorts of new fangled technologies for the future. At the same time, I still remember the HR people, during our orientation that our relationship with the company was that they "pay us and we work for them." We might not like the job we do, or some of the people around us, but the contractual relationship is pretty much "do what we're told to." Sounded like a paid version of slavery to me.
And now, that I think about it all, the whole idea seems rather absurd. I know there are people within the company coming up with projects that will hopefully make large sums of cash, the reward structure is that you might get a promotion or a bonus.. somewhere in the ball park of $10,000 or more depending on the contribution. But seriously, why would you want to settle for $10,000 if you're coming up with a multi-million dollar idea? I don't see any really good incentives.
And with that happening. I also think working in an environment like this will cause creative people to eventually go brain dead. I for one firmly believe that believe that creativity cannot be fostered by forcing people to follow orders. Especially from older people that aren't as in touch with the latest technologies or where the direction of technology will be going. I don't believe that most higher ups have the youthful visions of the younger people when it comes to understanding the potentials of what we can do with technology.
It says a lot about why most of the hottest start ups and growing companies are or have been full of young people. Older people, especially normal managers usually just can't cut it with coming up a great idea. It seems to be that they latch on to whatever seems hot or a cool seeming idea of someone else and start whipping people to do their bidding. I think it is kind of rare to find a management level kind of person that truly understands the pulse technology and where might it go.
One must truly love what they do, understand what would be truly be great to have and understand the community of people that use these things to understand where things will go. I'd have to say that most management people don't understand... they're just being paid to have their underlings make somethings that'll turn a profit.
Usually for large corporations it means more of the same. Make things smaller or bigger, faster, cheaper whatever. It's all sort of a variation of the same thing. 30~40 years ago, I guess you could say that having corporations was a necessity, because it was pretty expensive to get things done. Things have changed and the up front capital to building something or even getting a startup up and running has gotten much cheaper and I think it is the small startups with the fresh ideas are the ones that are going to have the biggest impact on society.
Large corporations aren't places where people have new ideas. Atleast that it from what I've seen so far, no matter how the managers and HR people want people to be creative to come up with the new great hit. The working environment of a large corporation just doesn't encourage people to be creative or take chances.
You just can't be creative when you have a bunch of managers telling you what to do while at the same time having to do all sorts of stupid things to get an idea past a manager so that you can just try it. It just doesn't work that way.
Would you want to pay $100,000 or $1,000
You know the saying "nobody got fired for buying IBM," I now have an idea of what that really means.
To do some experimentation work, we're ordering a $100,000 machine, custom built from the ground up. We have some power supplies here, some data loggers there and a bunch of other high precision stuff that lets us connect some wires to samples and measure data. After going through 2~3 levels of management to get the funding that machine is getting built. The problem is that I believe that I can build something that can do the same thing and probably out spec the machine that is coming in for about $1,000.
Sure, I made a presentation and suggested the idea of my version of the machine to the leaders, but it gained no traction. One suggested that it might be too much trouble to build the thing on our own. I recognize that the circuits that I've built will need some fine tuning to get things into spec but I think it's something doable. It annoyed me considering that with the current economic situation that we are being told to slow down on what we spend our cash on. Hell I'd rather build the machine and sell it off to them and pocket the difference!
The thing is that out of the people in my work group, I am pretty much the only person that knows anything about designing circuits and making programs. This is totally up my ally. Instead, they make me take charge of farming out the work to an outside company which I have a feeling that I can outclass the engineers doing the electronics and programming. I can understand why people might think spending $100,000 on the machine that we are brining in is reasonable but it's people with the $1,000 idea that can blow this stuff out of the water is what revolutions are made out of.
I have no interest in trying to bash heads with management because sometimes I think they're off the deep end. I've tried once to change the culture of a laboratory but that plan was met with resistance and apathy.
It would be exactly like the engineers at Xerox first giving birth to the graphical user interface and the mouse and then having the management people have no clue what this all ment. Apple and Microsoft came swooping in and now this technology is everywhere. It's exactly like that. Xerox would most certainly be smacking themselves in the head now for letting something like this get away from them.
I've once read somewhere that even if you've got a great idea, you're going to have to ram it down the throats of management to get anything done... in that sense, people won't understand a good idea even if it smacks them in the face. Some people at first thought that Google was a stupid idea with Yahoo, Excite and all the other search engines out there. I'll let results speak for themselves.
So far what I've learned is that if you really want something done, you're going to have to rely on your self.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
2007 and 2008 Yearly Expenditures
It's been a while since the last time I posted. Since the new year has started and I have some interesting data, I've decided to update with a post. And now, without further adieu I shall get on with it.
For those in the know, I keep track living expenses so I have an idea of where my money goes. The other benefit of tracking expenses is the ability to forecast future expenses which might be useful for setting cash flow objectives (ie. setting up income goals). The previous year is an interesting year, in that it was my first year (well, 9 months) as a salaried worker and with it, a move from Sendai to the outskirts of Tokyo.
Interestingly, I've realized that I've never posted my 2007 living expenses and I will be posting that data along with my 2008 data. The comparison beween 2007 and 2008 will be interesting as I will be able to compare my life as a student, living in Sendai versus living "in" Tokyo as a salaried worker. I will automatically note that living expenses in Sendai (especially for restaurants and entertainment) is much lower compared to Tokyo and we will see some of this information coming out of the graphs I will be presenting next.
2007 Expenditure Results
I shall start off with my year 2007 data. Firstly a bar graph of my categorized monthly data in the following figure (click to enlarge).
The currency for this and the following figures will be presented in Yen. The yen is quite strong at the moment with the exchange rate sitting at 100 yen : $1.4 CAD. The best way to interpret yen, however (especially when living in Japan), is to equate 100 yen to about $1, which is what 100 yen feels like when you spend it in Japan.
The graph is broken down to Food, Goods, Transport, Service, Room, Entertainment and Travel expenditures. My last report in 2006 did not include the "Travel" grouping but, I found that travel expenses are very significant irregular expenditures that should have a category of its own-- I've often found myself having a hard time classifying travel expenses between "Transportation" and "Entertainment" expenses as traveling is the intertwined combination of both.
Firstly I will summarize the 2007 cost totals by category:
Food: 267,465 Yen (think, $2,670)
Goods: 127,285 Yen (think, $1,270)
Transport: 61,416 Yen (think $610)
Service: 149,787 Yen (think $1,500)
Room: 391,232 Yen (think $3,900)
Entertainment: 234,254 Yen (think $2,340)
Travel: 1,083,542 Yen (think $10,800)
Firstly, monthly food expenses hover in the 40,000~28,000 (think $400~$280) range. The food expenditures tend to vary if I go traveling or not, where food expenditures tend to get lumped in with travel expenses and food expenses for the months of Nov and Dec are zero during my 3 month travel stint through SE Asia. Food expenses tend to be a rather stable recurring expense and on average sits about 35,000 yen/month.
The goods expenditure for 2007 was 127,000 (think $1,270) for the year. The only major expense I incurred was buying a suit for 31,000 yen. The rest of the incurred goods expenses ended up for esoteric things like floss, cell phone straps, post cards and etc.
Service fees totaled 149,787 yen (think $1,500) for the year. Half of the costs came from monthly cell phone usage (about 4,000 yen/month) and other small things like health insurance, snow board rentals and the like. I should also note that I was swindled out of 20,000 yen ish in Denmark by some Russians and I've lumed the damage as a "service fee" in my accounting books.
Transportation expenditures mainly consisted of me buying gas for my scooter (about 2000 yen/month) and the occasional car trips with friends into the country side, which might be a 4,000 yen/person (think $40) kind of thing. In general, my transportation costs have been quite lot.
Rent fees varied between 29,750 yen to 33,935 yen/month. The variation owing to varied usage of electricity, water and gas. Housing relating costs tend to be very constant.
Entertainment costs at it's maximum peaked at the 29,600 yen/month with the minimum sitting at 17,400 yen/month during a full month in Sendai. Compared to going out in Tokyo, going out for food and drinks or doing something is much cheaper compared to Tokyo, that data will be presented later.
Travel costs for the year came in at a whopping 1,083,542 yen, which would feel like something in the ball park of $10,800. The main expenditures here were a 10 day trip to France in February, a trip back to Canada in May, hitting Aomori in August for one of their summer festivals and the total costs of my first 2.5 months of traveling through SE Asia starting through mid-october with costs being tallied up to the end of December.
Living in SE Asia is very cheap. My traveling expenses for November, while I was in Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia accounted for a total of 227,684 yen (feels like $2,270) for an entire month of expenditures! This is like 1/2 the cost of a round trip ticket to Canada and I should note that these expenses also include plane tickets for me traveling around countries in SE as well!
The most financially painful parts of my travels were through Australia and New Zealand, where the high currency costs and the high living costs of those countries immediately doubled my traveling expenditures to 401,967 Yen (or like $4,020) for the month and this is after me trimming down my expenses like crazy in these countries (I lived relatively well in SE asia!). The combined costs of my SE asia costs for Oct, Nov and Dec with my France and trip to Canada quite quickly put the my traveling costs to about $10,000 CAD for the year, my largest (though irregular) expenditure.
My total living costs for the year of 2007 in Japan amounted to a total of 2,314,981 yen, half of the expenses coming from traveling. I know for sure that if I wanted to save money, I'd stop traveling.
The following pie chart illustrates the percentage breakdown of my living expenses (click for a larger image):
As shown here, travel expenses logged in at 47% of my expenses, nearly half of of all the money I spent in 2007. The next larges expenditure comes in the form of my rooming fees at 17%, then food at 12% then entertainment at 10%. The remaining service, transport and goods fees sum up to approximately 12%. If I wanted to trim down my expenditures, the most obvious things would be to trim down my travel and entertainment expenses and the remaining expenses would be considered "fixed expenditures."
2008 Expenditure Results and comparison with 2007
The end of my SE Asia trip occurred in mid January where I made my return to Japan for my placement interview prior to starting work. After the interview, I would remain in Japan until the end of March, where I would make my move from Sendai to the outskirts of Tokyo in a city called Atsugi. My expenditures for this year will generally include costs to settling down as I picked things up I needed over the entire year.
For my 2008 yearly data, I have made an additional category in addition to the usual Food, Goods, Transport, Service, Room, Entertainment and Travel break down to include salary deductions, as 2008 marks the year after I graduated from my masters program and me starting my work, and thus becoming required to pay government related expenses.
My 2008 expenses are summarized in the following chart (click for a larger image):
The summarized 2008 total expenses are summarized below:
Food: 400,223 Yen (think, $4,000)
Goods: 327,232 Yen (think, $3,270)
Transport: 141,896 Yen (think $1,410)
Service: 149,146 Yen (think $1,500)
Room: 281,159 Yen (think $2,800)
Entertainment: 474,034 Yen (think $4,740)
Travel: 436,524 Yen (think $4,370)
Deductions: 404,682 Yen (think $4,040)
Looking at the monthly data for food since moving to Atsugi, I find that in general, I am spending approximately 40,000 yen/month or 10,000 yen more/month to what I was spending in Sendai. In general, I am finding that I spend about 1,000 yen more every time I go to the grocery store when buying things. I have heard from friends that the grocery store near by where I live is somewhat expensive and that is showing up in my monthly expenes. There are some cheaper grocery stores in Atsugi, but it takes an additional 10 minute round trip via scooter. It would be an interesting experiment to see what savings I can generate by changing stores.
The costs for Goods for this year totaled 327,232 yen, with the most signigicant expenditure being the new desktop computer I bought over the summer. The computer is a Dual Core Athlon, 2x500 GB hard drives, 2x19" monitors, Geforce 9600 video card, 4 GB DDR2 ram system. This desktop has incredible power over a laptop and is still cheaper with a total price tag of about 120,000 yen (think $1,200 CAD). Most purchase of durable goods for this year included electronics parts in the 10,000 yen range / shopping spree and wedding presents for friends whom have rencelty gotten married.
Transportations costs for this year totaled 141,896 yen. Compared to my 2007 transportation costs, this is a drastic increase owing to weekend trips to Tokyo via train. A one way ticket to Tokyo from where I live costs in the range of 500 yen and traveling around to the different parts of Tokyo will cost an additional 300 yen extra, easily bringing my weekend transportation expenses to 1,300 yen. Having friends in the Tokyo area results in having everyone quite spread out, as opposed to having most of your friends concentrated in a smaller region while living in Sendai. While in Sendai, I rarely had to use any public transport to get out anywhere to meet up with friends. This is not the case when it comes to living in Tokyo. Monthly train costs easily rack up to about 6,000 yen/month which is easily 3 times the 2,000/month I used to spend just on gas for my scooter while in Sendai.
Service expenses for 2008 totalled 149,146 yen, which is almost spot on with the 149,787 worth of expenses for 2007. Apparently, moving to Tokyo did not result in a chance in my cell phone habits. Other notable service charges for this year included moving costs to get my stuff out of Sendai to Atsugi. My moving costs were subsidized up to 50,000 yen and I took an additional 28,000 yen additional charge to move extra things and my scooter here.
Room related expenditures totaled at 281,159 yen for 2008 compared to 391,232 Yen compared to 2007. This is mostly due to living in the company dorm where the rent is cheaper compared to living on one's own. I was previously living in an apparement share arrangement in Sendai with monthly base rent at 28,000 yen/month (a pretty good deal!) and I am now currently living in the company dorm at 16,000 yen/month, yielding the a 12,000 yen difference in savings. Over a 9 month period, this easily equates to the 100,000 yen savings recieved over the 9 months I've lived here. Though, if it would mean that I pay 100,000 more, it would be nice to be freely able to invite friends over. Unfortunately due to security reasons, friends are not generally allowed to stay over in the company dorms.
Entertainment costs for 2008 totaled 474,034 yen compared to 234,254 yen in 2007; a 240,000 yen increase (about 2 times). Going out and doing the same things I did in Sendai compared to doing things in Tokyo is doubly expensive. If I were to go till past midnight on food and drinks in Sendai, I'd spend about 5,000~6,000 yen. If I were to do the same thing in Tokyo, I'd spend 5,000 yen on the first dinner and drinks and then +3,000 yen on the next place for drinks (I also have to say that the food in Sendai also tastes better!) Often parties and events occur far from where I live and I generally would incur transportation costs to get to the event. Needless to say, going out and having fun in Tokyo is easly 2x more expensive compared to Sendai. Include going out for dinners and the occasional drink on weekday with colleagues, the costs here easily add up.
Travel costs for 2008 totaled 436,524 yen. The bulk of my travel expenses for this year was from my trip back to Vancouver + Toronto and the return leg of my New Zealand trip in January. Smaller traveling costs were incurred in Oct, Nov and Dec from trips back to Sendai for the Jazz festival, a wedding and an alumni reunion for my research lab.
Salary deductions for this year totaled 404,682 yen. Deductions represent any direct deduction from salary and government related taxes. These deductions include income tax, pension payments, unemployment insurance and medical insurance. The spike seen in December is a result from receiving a "winter bonus" which is payed to most salaried workers and paying taxes on it. In Japan, bonuses are given out in summer and winter totaling about 2.5 times your monthly salary (as a result, monthly salaries here are a bit lower).
My total expenditures for 2008 totaled 2,614,900 yen (think $26,150). Living expenses (total expenditures - salary deductions) were 2,210,218 (think $22,100) compared to 2,314,981 yen in living expenses in 2007. The numbers are comparable because of the expensive SE Asia trip represented in the costs.
There will be an additional tax (municipal) deduction on my income starting next year as municipal taxes take a year to kick in and will result in a doubling in the amount of taxes I pay (yuck). Those numbers will be seen after my 2009 expenditure summary is compiled.
Finally, attached below is the pie chart of 2008's expenditures:
Compared to the 2007 pie chart we see that the cost of food (12% vs 15%), entertainment (10% vs 18%) and transportation (3% vs 5%) have increased since moving from Sendai. We see a decrease in rooming costs (11% vs 17%) resulting from living in the cheaper company dorm. Service fees remain relatively the same. Travel costs are lower due to the lack of any "long big" trips for this year and in it's place, I get to pay taxes in the form of deductions instead.
I have to say that comparing 2007 and 2008 pie charts is rather misleading because percentages tend to be viewed as linear. For example one might just think that transportation costs from 3% to 5% as something insignificant since it might only look like a 2% increase (it pretty much doubled in my case!) and it also does not do a good job of illustrating the total amount of cash spent. I will limit pie chart graphical interpretations to the year only and avoid pie chart to pie chart comparisons in the future.
Final Comments
By the looks of the data, it does seem that living in Sendai and maintaining a social life is much cheaper (at about 2x) compared to the Tokyo region. Transportation costs are also cheaper for Sendai since traveling around by train is not really required (especially if you live in the down town area).
Most of my disposable income seems to go into the traveling and entertainment category. If I wanted to increase the amount of money I saved, it would be an no brainer to cut back on traveling and going out. Traveling and entertainment costs for 2008 hit in the 900,000 yen range (think $9,000). Obviously cutting down to zero would be quite painful, but cutting down to 450,000 yen (think $4,500) would be rather reasonable (if most of the cutting occured with the traveling part). I spent about 300,000 yen on goods and it might be reasonable to cut that down to 150,000 to get a total 600,000 (think $6,000) in savings over an entire year.
Interestingly $6,000 over an entire year somehow doesn't sound like a huge amount, but it does makes quite a difference when it comes to traveling and having fun. However, if saved and invested properly over several years, it can make quite a difference. I would be interested to run some calculations later on, but that would be for a different post.
For those in the know, I keep track living expenses so I have an idea of where my money goes. The other benefit of tracking expenses is the ability to forecast future expenses which might be useful for setting cash flow objectives (ie. setting up income goals). The previous year is an interesting year, in that it was my first year (well, 9 months) as a salaried worker and with it, a move from Sendai to the outskirts of Tokyo.
Interestingly, I've realized that I've never posted my 2007 living expenses and I will be posting that data along with my 2008 data. The comparison beween 2007 and 2008 will be interesting as I will be able to compare my life as a student, living in Sendai versus living "in" Tokyo as a salaried worker. I will automatically note that living expenses in Sendai (especially for restaurants and entertainment) is much lower compared to Tokyo and we will see some of this information coming out of the graphs I will be presenting next.
2007 Expenditure Results
I shall start off with my year 2007 data. Firstly a bar graph of my categorized monthly data in the following figure (click to enlarge).
The currency for this and the following figures will be presented in Yen. The yen is quite strong at the moment with the exchange rate sitting at 100 yen : $1.4 CAD. The best way to interpret yen, however (especially when living in Japan), is to equate 100 yen to about $1, which is what 100 yen feels like when you spend it in Japan.
The graph is broken down to Food, Goods, Transport, Service, Room, Entertainment and Travel expenditures. My last report in 2006 did not include the "Travel" grouping but, I found that travel expenses are very significant irregular expenditures that should have a category of its own-- I've often found myself having a hard time classifying travel expenses between "Transportation" and "Entertainment" expenses as traveling is the intertwined combination of both.
Firstly I will summarize the 2007 cost totals by category:
Food: 267,465 Yen (think, $2,670)
Goods: 127,285 Yen (think, $1,270)
Transport: 61,416 Yen (think $610)
Service: 149,787 Yen (think $1,500)
Room: 391,232 Yen (think $3,900)
Entertainment: 234,254 Yen (think $2,340)
Travel: 1,083,542 Yen (think $10,800)
Firstly, monthly food expenses hover in the 40,000~28,000 (think $400~$280) range. The food expenditures tend to vary if I go traveling or not, where food expenditures tend to get lumped in with travel expenses and food expenses for the months of Nov and Dec are zero during my 3 month travel stint through SE Asia. Food expenses tend to be a rather stable recurring expense and on average sits about 35,000 yen/month.
The goods expenditure for 2007 was 127,000 (think $1,270) for the year. The only major expense I incurred was buying a suit for 31,000 yen. The rest of the incurred goods expenses ended up for esoteric things like floss, cell phone straps, post cards and etc.
Service fees totaled 149,787 yen (think $1,500) for the year. Half of the costs came from monthly cell phone usage (about 4,000 yen/month) and other small things like health insurance, snow board rentals and the like. I should also note that I was swindled out of 20,000 yen ish in Denmark by some Russians and I've lumed the damage as a "service fee" in my accounting books.
Transportation expenditures mainly consisted of me buying gas for my scooter (about 2000 yen/month) and the occasional car trips with friends into the country side, which might be a 4,000 yen/person (think $40) kind of thing. In general, my transportation costs have been quite lot.
Rent fees varied between 29,750 yen to 33,935 yen/month. The variation owing to varied usage of electricity, water and gas. Housing relating costs tend to be very constant.
Entertainment costs at it's maximum peaked at the 29,600 yen/month with the minimum sitting at 17,400 yen/month during a full month in Sendai. Compared to going out in Tokyo, going out for food and drinks or doing something is much cheaper compared to Tokyo, that data will be presented later.
Travel costs for the year came in at a whopping 1,083,542 yen, which would feel like something in the ball park of $10,800. The main expenditures here were a 10 day trip to France in February, a trip back to Canada in May, hitting Aomori in August for one of their summer festivals and the total costs of my first 2.5 months of traveling through SE Asia starting through mid-october with costs being tallied up to the end of December.
Living in SE Asia is very cheap. My traveling expenses for November, while I was in Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia accounted for a total of 227,684 yen (feels like $2,270) for an entire month of expenditures! This is like 1/2 the cost of a round trip ticket to Canada and I should note that these expenses also include plane tickets for me traveling around countries in SE as well!
The most financially painful parts of my travels were through Australia and New Zealand, where the high currency costs and the high living costs of those countries immediately doubled my traveling expenditures to 401,967 Yen (or like $4,020) for the month and this is after me trimming down my expenses like crazy in these countries (I lived relatively well in SE asia!). The combined costs of my SE asia costs for Oct, Nov and Dec with my France and trip to Canada quite quickly put the my traveling costs to about $10,000 CAD for the year, my largest (though irregular) expenditure.
My total living costs for the year of 2007 in Japan amounted to a total of 2,314,981 yen, half of the expenses coming from traveling. I know for sure that if I wanted to save money, I'd stop traveling.
The following pie chart illustrates the percentage breakdown of my living expenses (click for a larger image):
As shown here, travel expenses logged in at 47% of my expenses, nearly half of of all the money I spent in 2007. The next larges expenditure comes in the form of my rooming fees at 17%, then food at 12% then entertainment at 10%. The remaining service, transport and goods fees sum up to approximately 12%. If I wanted to trim down my expenditures, the most obvious things would be to trim down my travel and entertainment expenses and the remaining expenses would be considered "fixed expenditures."
2008 Expenditure Results and comparison with 2007
The end of my SE Asia trip occurred in mid January where I made my return to Japan for my placement interview prior to starting work. After the interview, I would remain in Japan until the end of March, where I would make my move from Sendai to the outskirts of Tokyo in a city called Atsugi. My expenditures for this year will generally include costs to settling down as I picked things up I needed over the entire year.
For my 2008 yearly data, I have made an additional category in addition to the usual Food, Goods, Transport, Service, Room, Entertainment and Travel break down to include salary deductions, as 2008 marks the year after I graduated from my masters program and me starting my work, and thus becoming required to pay government related expenses.
My 2008 expenses are summarized in the following chart (click for a larger image):
The summarized 2008 total expenses are summarized below:
Food: 400,223 Yen (think, $4,000)
Goods: 327,232 Yen (think, $3,270)
Transport: 141,896 Yen (think $1,410)
Service: 149,146 Yen (think $1,500)
Room: 281,159 Yen (think $2,800)
Entertainment: 474,034 Yen (think $4,740)
Travel: 436,524 Yen (think $4,370)
Deductions: 404,682 Yen (think $4,040)
Looking at the monthly data for food since moving to Atsugi, I find that in general, I am spending approximately 40,000 yen/month or 10,000 yen more/month to what I was spending in Sendai. In general, I am finding that I spend about 1,000 yen more every time I go to the grocery store when buying things. I have heard from friends that the grocery store near by where I live is somewhat expensive and that is showing up in my monthly expenes. There are some cheaper grocery stores in Atsugi, but it takes an additional 10 minute round trip via scooter. It would be an interesting experiment to see what savings I can generate by changing stores.
The costs for Goods for this year totaled 327,232 yen, with the most signigicant expenditure being the new desktop computer I bought over the summer. The computer is a Dual Core Athlon, 2x500 GB hard drives, 2x19" monitors, Geforce 9600 video card, 4 GB DDR2 ram system. This desktop has incredible power over a laptop and is still cheaper with a total price tag of about 120,000 yen (think $1,200 CAD). Most purchase of durable goods for this year included electronics parts in the 10,000 yen range / shopping spree and wedding presents for friends whom have rencelty gotten married.
Transportations costs for this year totaled 141,896 yen. Compared to my 2007 transportation costs, this is a drastic increase owing to weekend trips to Tokyo via train. A one way ticket to Tokyo from where I live costs in the range of 500 yen and traveling around to the different parts of Tokyo will cost an additional 300 yen extra, easily bringing my weekend transportation expenses to 1,300 yen. Having friends in the Tokyo area results in having everyone quite spread out, as opposed to having most of your friends concentrated in a smaller region while living in Sendai. While in Sendai, I rarely had to use any public transport to get out anywhere to meet up with friends. This is not the case when it comes to living in Tokyo. Monthly train costs easily rack up to about 6,000 yen/month which is easily 3 times the 2,000/month I used to spend just on gas for my scooter while in Sendai.
Service expenses for 2008 totalled 149,146 yen, which is almost spot on with the 149,787 worth of expenses for 2007. Apparently, moving to Tokyo did not result in a chance in my cell phone habits. Other notable service charges for this year included moving costs to get my stuff out of Sendai to Atsugi. My moving costs were subsidized up to 50,000 yen and I took an additional 28,000 yen additional charge to move extra things and my scooter here.
Room related expenditures totaled at 281,159 yen for 2008 compared to 391,232 Yen compared to 2007. This is mostly due to living in the company dorm where the rent is cheaper compared to living on one's own. I was previously living in an apparement share arrangement in Sendai with monthly base rent at 28,000 yen/month (a pretty good deal!) and I am now currently living in the company dorm at 16,000 yen/month, yielding the a 12,000 yen difference in savings. Over a 9 month period, this easily equates to the 100,000 yen savings recieved over the 9 months I've lived here. Though, if it would mean that I pay 100,000 more, it would be nice to be freely able to invite friends over. Unfortunately due to security reasons, friends are not generally allowed to stay over in the company dorms.
Entertainment costs for 2008 totaled 474,034 yen compared to 234,254 yen in 2007; a 240,000 yen increase (about 2 times). Going out and doing the same things I did in Sendai compared to doing things in Tokyo is doubly expensive. If I were to go till past midnight on food and drinks in Sendai, I'd spend about 5,000~6,000 yen. If I were to do the same thing in Tokyo, I'd spend 5,000 yen on the first dinner and drinks and then +3,000 yen on the next place for drinks (I also have to say that the food in Sendai also tastes better!) Often parties and events occur far from where I live and I generally would incur transportation costs to get to the event. Needless to say, going out and having fun in Tokyo is easly 2x more expensive compared to Sendai. Include going out for dinners and the occasional drink on weekday with colleagues, the costs here easily add up.
Travel costs for 2008 totaled 436,524 yen. The bulk of my travel expenses for this year was from my trip back to Vancouver + Toronto and the return leg of my New Zealand trip in January. Smaller traveling costs were incurred in Oct, Nov and Dec from trips back to Sendai for the Jazz festival, a wedding and an alumni reunion for my research lab.
Salary deductions for this year totaled 404,682 yen. Deductions represent any direct deduction from salary and government related taxes. These deductions include income tax, pension payments, unemployment insurance and medical insurance. The spike seen in December is a result from receiving a "winter bonus" which is payed to most salaried workers and paying taxes on it. In Japan, bonuses are given out in summer and winter totaling about 2.5 times your monthly salary (as a result, monthly salaries here are a bit lower).
My total expenditures for 2008 totaled 2,614,900 yen (think $26,150). Living expenses (total expenditures - salary deductions) were 2,210,218 (think $22,100) compared to 2,314,981 yen in living expenses in 2007. The numbers are comparable because of the expensive SE Asia trip represented in the costs.
There will be an additional tax (municipal) deduction on my income starting next year as municipal taxes take a year to kick in and will result in a doubling in the amount of taxes I pay (yuck). Those numbers will be seen after my 2009 expenditure summary is compiled.
Finally, attached below is the pie chart of 2008's expenditures:
Compared to the 2007 pie chart we see that the cost of food (12% vs 15%), entertainment (10% vs 18%) and transportation (3% vs 5%) have increased since moving from Sendai. We see a decrease in rooming costs (11% vs 17%) resulting from living in the cheaper company dorm. Service fees remain relatively the same. Travel costs are lower due to the lack of any "long big" trips for this year and in it's place, I get to pay taxes in the form of deductions instead.
I have to say that comparing 2007 and 2008 pie charts is rather misleading because percentages tend to be viewed as linear. For example one might just think that transportation costs from 3% to 5% as something insignificant since it might only look like a 2% increase (it pretty much doubled in my case!) and it also does not do a good job of illustrating the total amount of cash spent. I will limit pie chart graphical interpretations to the year only and avoid pie chart to pie chart comparisons in the future.
Final Comments
By the looks of the data, it does seem that living in Sendai and maintaining a social life is much cheaper (at about 2x) compared to the Tokyo region. Transportation costs are also cheaper for Sendai since traveling around by train is not really required (especially if you live in the down town area).
Most of my disposable income seems to go into the traveling and entertainment category. If I wanted to increase the amount of money I saved, it would be an no brainer to cut back on traveling and going out. Traveling and entertainment costs for 2008 hit in the 900,000 yen range (think $9,000). Obviously cutting down to zero would be quite painful, but cutting down to 450,000 yen (think $4,500) would be rather reasonable (if most of the cutting occured with the traveling part). I spent about 300,000 yen on goods and it might be reasonable to cut that down to 150,000 to get a total 600,000 (think $6,000) in savings over an entire year.
Interestingly $6,000 over an entire year somehow doesn't sound like a huge amount, but it does makes quite a difference when it comes to traveling and having fun. However, if saved and invested properly over several years, it can make quite a difference. I would be interested to run some calculations later on, but that would be for a different post.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Having my butt kicked in the market
The stock market is depressing that I've stopped looking at it and really didn't really want to post on the blog since it's all I've been posting about recently.
I still have some positions left in the market and things continually get worse and worse. My account is taking a huge hurting. At least I can be thankful that I have a stable job and I've kept a decent reserve of cash for living expenses. Though my rainy day fund, which was supposed to let let me live worry free for at least a year or 2 worry free has been substantially crushed.
In the big picture of things, I guess living through a screw up like while young isn't too bad. I'll recover the cash through work and I don't have any debts. I'll also have experience living through an economic crash, which is far better experience than any textbook might actually offer.
Unfortunately, I am away from my main computer at home for atleast the next week which I have access to my trading account (there is some time dependent password that I didn't bring with me to access my trading acount) so I don't know how much I've lost. But it's now at least in the -$10,000 ball park. Ouch.
This loss, compared to the $100,000's with others have lost is small potatoes so I'll just be glad with that and equip myself to deal with things better the next time around.
I still have some positions left in the market and things continually get worse and worse. My account is taking a huge hurting. At least I can be thankful that I have a stable job and I've kept a decent reserve of cash for living expenses. Though my rainy day fund, which was supposed to let let me live worry free for at least a year or 2 worry free has been substantially crushed.
In the big picture of things, I guess living through a screw up like while young isn't too bad. I'll recover the cash through work and I don't have any debts. I'll also have experience living through an economic crash, which is far better experience than any textbook might actually offer.
Unfortunately, I am away from my main computer at home for atleast the next week which I have access to my trading account (there is some time dependent password that I didn't bring with me to access my trading acount) so I don't know how much I've lost. But it's now at least in the -$10,000 ball park. Ouch.
This loss, compared to the $100,000's with others have lost is small potatoes so I'll just be glad with that and equip myself to deal with things better the next time around.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Ugh: Scaling out of the market
Obviously I don't understand what is going on in the market right now. I have sold off my positions in dividend yielding companies because the dividends they would pay out simply does not keep pace with the amount of money I was losing daily from the drop in stock prices.
I've already lost about 50% of what I had in total in the market after a 25% drop in prices. I now have first hand experience in understanding what it is like to lose a good chunk of cash in the market as a result of leveraging. Relying on my gut and decent book prices of a stock wasn't sufficient to prevent myself from losing big time, as it seems that macro economic factors in the market is brining everything down.
I sold my positions today because I am believe that the market will continue to deteriorate and will admit that I made a huge mistake on trying to catch a local bounce that never did happen. For the time being, I will scale back and get out of my positions in the market over the course of the next while. I am expecting bad 3rd quarter reports and probably worse winter sales.
I will be spending the coming week/month doing research on understanding what went wrong and developing a better prediction of the future.
I've already lost about 50% of what I had in total in the market after a 25% drop in prices. I now have first hand experience in understanding what it is like to lose a good chunk of cash in the market as a result of leveraging. Relying on my gut and decent book prices of a stock wasn't sufficient to prevent myself from losing big time, as it seems that macro economic factors in the market is brining everything down.
I sold my positions today because I am believe that the market will continue to deteriorate and will admit that I made a huge mistake on trying to catch a local bounce that never did happen. For the time being, I will scale back and get out of my positions in the market over the course of the next while. I am expecting bad 3rd quarter reports and probably worse winter sales.
I will be spending the coming week/month doing research on understanding what went wrong and developing a better prediction of the future.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Will probably get slaughtered in the market
I am very amazed with the prices dropping as they are right now. To the point that they don't make sense. I originally thought I had found a bottom in the market a while back, but it seems that I was wrong as the markets are starting to panic about the 3rd quarter results, thus pushing the stock market lower.
30 minutes till the markets open today. Asia is down 10% as of today and it looks like things are going to be particularly nasty today. The stocks I hold right now are probably going to open 20% down and me being leveraged, I am going to get hit pretty badly, with numbers as they are right now, I am likely going to lose about 1/2 of what I have in the market today.
This is truly a humbling experience as I am going to have my ass handed to me. Well, I guess this is a lesson better learned now than later.
30 minutes till the markets open today. Asia is down 10% as of today and it looks like things are going to be particularly nasty today. The stocks I hold right now are probably going to open 20% down and me being leveraged, I am going to get hit pretty badly, with numbers as they are right now, I am likely going to lose about 1/2 of what I have in the market today.
This is truly a humbling experience as I am going to have my ass handed to me. Well, I guess this is a lesson better learned now than later.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Market Outlook
Disclaimer: This is obviously a personal opinion here so I highly suggest that readers here take this with a grain of salt.
I have been thinking about my plans to trade over the coming year and this post is to help me to keep track of my frame of mind over the coming months. That is, in the case that I screw up pretty badly, I'll know exactly what I was thinking.
With the stock market in confusion, I believe that the market will be over responsive to any sort of news in the coming future and I am expecting high volatility. The market will likely rebound over the next month in a similar fashion seen in the January crash after the Bear Stearn debacle. With government intervention from the US and around the world, I believe that the markets will temporally stabilize over the coming months.
However, I still believe that the fundamentals of the economy will still be weak.
My plans are to now to get myself into some positions in the market over the next few days. The market has rallied rather sharply over the course of the last 2 days and I believe that there will be a small dip coming up as people cash out to take out some profits.
I will mention that I did something rather bad yesterday and got into the market a little early (call it an emotional trade) and got hit by a small dip in prices towards the end of the trading session yesterday. I see that strong nerves are required to prevent reactionary trades and thus am requiring myself to formulate a strategy that I will stick to and evaluate as events develop over the coming year. But enough of this tangent...
After the rebound, I expect that winter sales will be poor due to the poor financial condition of the general public and will be expecting that companies to post sub-par quarterly results for the first quarter of 2009. With this said, I believe that the stock market will stagnate or slide downward towards the beginning of next year.
Officialy, the US is not in a recession yet as defined by having 2 consecutive quarters with negative GDP growth. However, I believe that the current Bush administration has been cooking the numbers so that they will not have to announce that the US is in recession and take the blame for their poor economic policies. The word on the street, however, is that the US is in recession as a result of rising commodity prices.
Monte carlo simulations on the November US election results indicate a 97.8% chance of a Democratic win for the election based on data posted at the intrade website. Assuming a Democratic party win in the US the stock market may start to rise with confidence in the Democratic nominee, Barak Obama, but that will not occur to next year.
Looking at the data posted at the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the data there indicates that the US GDP grew by 2.8% in the second quarter of 2008 and personal income grew by 0.5%. The data here indicates to me that the average American is going further into debt because the GDP generally represents how much people are spending... and they are spending more than their earnings are increasing. I should note that the GDP represents spending by businesses and individuals but I am running on the assumption that the increased spending between businesses and individuals is approximately the same.
The next report on the economy will be on Oct 31 and it will be interesting to see the GDP growth number. If the numbers are negative this quarter, it could send the stock market down somewhat, though I am willing to bet that the numbers will be doctored to be positive. Over the past year, the GDP has been positive despite the sub-prime crisis. But it could be possible for the GDP to turn negative this quarter.
How will I play this?
I will play the current market by buying into a few positions now and holding them till after October and then selling those positions off as I do not have confidence in the current world/US economic situation. I believe that poor economic results will be posted over the winter season and probably to atleast the beginning of next year.
When the market rebounds over the next month or so, I am expecting the price of gold which is a hedge against bad economic conditions to fall as confidence in the market grows. When gold (and possibly silver prices) look attractive, I will move into take a small or medium position in the metals and keep approximately 50% of my portfolio in cash and move the money out of USD. The USD rallied recently against the CAD recently and it would be nice to take advantage of this. I believe that the USD may drop in value over the coming 6 months due to continued deficit spending and the weak economy.
I may decide on keeping small or medium positions in companies with good dividend yields while waiting for the economy to recover. During this time, I will be on the look out for good bargains in the market. I may hold some good dividend paying companies after the bounce as these companies will be paying out their dividends fairly soon in the 3rd quarter of this year.
Edit:
This was posted before the market opened on Oct 15th... the bad play I made yesterday, by jumping into taking some positions too early materialized as the market dropped today... silly me for not taking my own advice. I bought into some more positions and will be waiting (hoping?) for the market to bounce somewhat over the next few weeks.
I have been thinking about my plans to trade over the coming year and this post is to help me to keep track of my frame of mind over the coming months. That is, in the case that I screw up pretty badly, I'll know exactly what I was thinking.
With the stock market in confusion, I believe that the market will be over responsive to any sort of news in the coming future and I am expecting high volatility. The market will likely rebound over the next month in a similar fashion seen in the January crash after the Bear Stearn debacle. With government intervention from the US and around the world, I believe that the markets will temporally stabilize over the coming months.
However, I still believe that the fundamentals of the economy will still be weak.
My plans are to now to get myself into some positions in the market over the next few days. The market has rallied rather sharply over the course of the last 2 days and I believe that there will be a small dip coming up as people cash out to take out some profits.
I will mention that I did something rather bad yesterday and got into the market a little early (call it an emotional trade) and got hit by a small dip in prices towards the end of the trading session yesterday. I see that strong nerves are required to prevent reactionary trades and thus am requiring myself to formulate a strategy that I will stick to and evaluate as events develop over the coming year. But enough of this tangent...
After the rebound, I expect that winter sales will be poor due to the poor financial condition of the general public and will be expecting that companies to post sub-par quarterly results for the first quarter of 2009. With this said, I believe that the stock market will stagnate or slide downward towards the beginning of next year.
Officialy, the US is not in a recession yet as defined by having 2 consecutive quarters with negative GDP growth. However, I believe that the current Bush administration has been cooking the numbers so that they will not have to announce that the US is in recession and take the blame for their poor economic policies. The word on the street, however, is that the US is in recession as a result of rising commodity prices.
Monte carlo simulations on the November US election results indicate a 97.8% chance of a Democratic win for the election based on data posted at the intrade website. Assuming a Democratic party win in the US the stock market may start to rise with confidence in the Democratic nominee, Barak Obama, but that will not occur to next year.
Looking at the data posted at the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the data there indicates that the US GDP grew by 2.8% in the second quarter of 2008 and personal income grew by 0.5%. The data here indicates to me that the average American is going further into debt because the GDP generally represents how much people are spending... and they are spending more than their earnings are increasing. I should note that the GDP represents spending by businesses and individuals but I am running on the assumption that the increased spending between businesses and individuals is approximately the same.
The next report on the economy will be on Oct 31 and it will be interesting to see the GDP growth number. If the numbers are negative this quarter, it could send the stock market down somewhat, though I am willing to bet that the numbers will be doctored to be positive. Over the past year, the GDP has been positive despite the sub-prime crisis. But it could be possible for the GDP to turn negative this quarter.
How will I play this?
I will play the current market by buying into a few positions now and holding them till after October and then selling those positions off as I do not have confidence in the current world/US economic situation. I believe that poor economic results will be posted over the winter season and probably to atleast the beginning of next year.
When the market rebounds over the next month or so, I am expecting the price of gold which is a hedge against bad economic conditions to fall as confidence in the market grows. When gold (and possibly silver prices) look attractive, I will move into take a small or medium position in the metals and keep approximately 50% of my portfolio in cash and move the money out of USD. The USD rallied recently against the CAD recently and it would be nice to take advantage of this. I believe that the USD may drop in value over the coming 6 months due to continued deficit spending and the weak economy.
I may decide on keeping small or medium positions in companies with good dividend yields while waiting for the economy to recover. During this time, I will be on the look out for good bargains in the market. I may hold some good dividend paying companies after the bounce as these companies will be paying out their dividends fairly soon in the 3rd quarter of this year.
Edit:
This was posted before the market opened on Oct 15th... the bad play I made yesterday, by jumping into taking some positions too early materialized as the market dropped today... silly me for not taking my own advice. I bought into some more positions and will be waiting (hoping?) for the market to bounce somewhat over the next few weeks.
Stock market watch: Local Bottom hit, on Rebound
In terms of the market, I believe that we have hit the bottom on Oct 10th. Looking at some of the stocks right now, some of them are trading below or at their book value, meaning that further decline in prices represent excellent buying opportunities, especially for companies that have positive net cash flow for the past 5 years.
The market rallied today and yesterday and I expect a small drop tomorrow or the day after with some profit taking going on. I believe that over the course of the next month that we will likely see a 30%~40% increase in stock value as the market rebounds.
For the past few days, I have been skimming small profits on volatility in prices over a period of a few days (and no! I am not doing intra-day trading).
I will now be changing my strategy to pick up some stocks that I think are undervalued starting tomorrow and hold them for the next month and then pull out of the market after gunning for a 30%~35% appreciation in capital value. During the whole financial meltdown, I have not gone on margin (I abhor loans!) however in this case, I believe that I am willing to go on margin for about 50%~75% of my equity (ie. a debt:equity of 0.5:1 ~ 0.75:1) for a short period of time.
Fortunate for me, amount of capital I have at stake, though a moderate sum, will not put me into financial danger in the worse case scenario. This next month will be interesting.
The reason I write this is to prevent myself from getting caught up in the day to day movements in stock prices (as watching the numbers is quite addictive!) and focus on a medium/short term plan.
I will post more later on.
Wish me luck.
The market rallied today and yesterday and I expect a small drop tomorrow or the day after with some profit taking going on. I believe that over the course of the next month that we will likely see a 30%~40% increase in stock value as the market rebounds.
For the past few days, I have been skimming small profits on volatility in prices over a period of a few days (and no! I am not doing intra-day trading).
I will now be changing my strategy to pick up some stocks that I think are undervalued starting tomorrow and hold them for the next month and then pull out of the market after gunning for a 30%~35% appreciation in capital value. During the whole financial meltdown, I have not gone on margin (I abhor loans!) however in this case, I believe that I am willing to go on margin for about 50%~75% of my equity (ie. a debt:equity of 0.5:1 ~ 0.75:1) for a short period of time.
Fortunate for me, amount of capital I have at stake, though a moderate sum, will not put me into financial danger in the worse case scenario. This next month will be interesting.
The reason I write this is to prevent myself from getting caught up in the day to day movements in stock prices (as watching the numbers is quite addictive!) and focus on a medium/short term plan.
I will post more later on.
Wish me luck.
Monday, October 13, 2008
North American TV programming is obnoxious
I have just returned to Japan after staying in Canada for a week to attend a good friend's wedding and doing some relaxing at home. While at home, I had plenty of spare time that I decided to watch some TV to see what kind of programs there are since I haven't seen much North American programming in a long time. What I did manage to see was rather disappointing.
The first thing about North American TV programming, after living in Japan without a TV for 4 years, was that the characters on most programs were obnoxious, petty and incredibly loud mouthed. I also think that compared to last the last time I was home, I also found that people in general tended to be far more loud mouthed. But first, I should illustrate this with a few examples.
Reality TV
I think Reality TV is probably one of the worst culprits when it comes to obnoxiousness, and this is a result of the design of TV program itself-- the program is based around the drama and conflict between characters, if there was none, there'd really be no content.
I saw a program called I want to work for Diddy while I was back; it was basically was a rip off of Donald Trumps "Apprentice," where the contestants were competing to be the main assistant to Puff Daddy, a rapper. Like the Apprentice, the show was about focusing on the conflict between the contestants, for example how they would argue against each other about who didn't do their job, who did their job the best and etc. But the things they would argue about were so incredibly petty, things such as who was working properly at some event, about how they didn't agree about the kind of food they would order and so on.
The whole show was like taking an ordinary uneventful grocery shopping event and turning it into a drama over 2 people arguing apples vs oranges and then having some kind meltdown occur because they couldn't agree. It's as ludicrous as that.
I could even talk about another show called Say yes to the Dress, which is a bridal TV reality show where brides bring their family and friends to help them out to pick a wedding dress. The portion of the episode I watched had a picky and somewhat demanding bride trying to choose a dress with the husband and and their respective families. The whole show would basically be a semi-drama about the bride trying to pick a dress that would appease herself and the family. The show would go on about where some people didn't like how bride's but stuck out in one dress or the bride not liking the amount of cleavage showing in another dress or whatever, but the thing that bothered me the most about this show was how they some how they turned the act of simply choosing a wedding dress into some drama.
Our society has become more obnoxious
As a result of the abundance of TV programs like these increasing over the years, I personally feel that our society is becoming more and more obnoxious and judgemental from the conversations I've overheard while being back home.
I'd be hearing conversations like how some person might not like Indian food and then make sweeping disapproval about "how could they like such spicy and pungent spices" or how something arbitrary sounding is better than some other arbitrary thing. A mode of thought like this breeds contention and conflict instead of acceptance and understanding.
Often I find myself with having a hard time relating to such people because I simply do not have an interest in participating in an intense, inconsequential discussion. Actually, when involved in such discussions, I usually have very little to say.
When is comes to an argument about the superiority of oranges versus apples, I would much rather say that I like apples and don't really mind at all which fruit you like best, because I would much rather be doing something enjoyable/important instead.
The first thing about North American TV programming, after living in Japan without a TV for 4 years, was that the characters on most programs were obnoxious, petty and incredibly loud mouthed. I also think that compared to last the last time I was home, I also found that people in general tended to be far more loud mouthed. But first, I should illustrate this with a few examples.
Reality TV
I think Reality TV is probably one of the worst culprits when it comes to obnoxiousness, and this is a result of the design of TV program itself-- the program is based around the drama and conflict between characters, if there was none, there'd really be no content.
I saw a program called I want to work for Diddy while I was back; it was basically was a rip off of Donald Trumps "Apprentice," where the contestants were competing to be the main assistant to Puff Daddy, a rapper. Like the Apprentice, the show was about focusing on the conflict between the contestants, for example how they would argue against each other about who didn't do their job, who did their job the best and etc. But the things they would argue about were so incredibly petty, things such as who was working properly at some event, about how they didn't agree about the kind of food they would order and so on.
The whole show was like taking an ordinary uneventful grocery shopping event and turning it into a drama over 2 people arguing apples vs oranges and then having some kind meltdown occur because they couldn't agree. It's as ludicrous as that.
I could even talk about another show called Say yes to the Dress, which is a bridal TV reality show where brides bring their family and friends to help them out to pick a wedding dress. The portion of the episode I watched had a picky and somewhat demanding bride trying to choose a dress with the husband and and their respective families. The whole show would basically be a semi-drama about the bride trying to pick a dress that would appease herself and the family. The show would go on about where some people didn't like how bride's but stuck out in one dress or the bride not liking the amount of cleavage showing in another dress or whatever, but the thing that bothered me the most about this show was how they some how they turned the act of simply choosing a wedding dress into some drama.
Our society has become more obnoxious
As a result of the abundance of TV programs like these increasing over the years, I personally feel that our society is becoming more and more obnoxious and judgemental from the conversations I've overheard while being back home.
I'd be hearing conversations like how some person might not like Indian food and then make sweeping disapproval about "how could they like such spicy and pungent spices" or how something arbitrary sounding is better than some other arbitrary thing. A mode of thought like this breeds contention and conflict instead of acceptance and understanding.
Often I find myself with having a hard time relating to such people because I simply do not have an interest in participating in an intense, inconsequential discussion. Actually, when involved in such discussions, I usually have very little to say.
When is comes to an argument about the superiority of oranges versus apples, I would much rather say that I like apples and don't really mind at all which fruit you like best, because I would much rather be doing something enjoyable/important instead.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
It's more about controversy/drama and less about consensus
I am not a huge fan of the mainstream media. The news in general is usually depressing, stories about car crashes, accidents, scandals, wars and about the kinds of mischief the celebrities are up to. Most of the news reported on TV is utter garbage. The only redeeming thing about the news is that sometimes, something important get reported on (like the crashing and burning US economy), but after that, you're better off on your own doing research to figure out what is really going on.
But for all controversies or crisis', the one thing I hate the most about the way current news is being reported is all of these so called "analysts" that come onto the show and have some kind of contrived debate for all of 5 to 10 minutes where the reporter pretends to ask superficially important seeming questions and have the analysts bash their heads against each other. The segment ends with no sort of consensus or any conclusion.
I would say that the whole point of the whole exercise is to "stir shit up." Complete and utter garbage in my not so humble opinion.
But this is pretty much what the whole news business is all about.
A Conflict of Interest
If there is anything good for news ratings, it all about controversy. The news could give less of a damn about coming to sound conclusions or justly educating their viewers.
The current US election cycle is a prime example of this phenomenon. I will disclose that I have positive bias to Obama, the Democratic candidate. Before the beginning of the election cycle and the exceptionally low approval ratings of the current administration (dipping to the 28% range!) it simply baffles me as to how can the current opinion polls between the Democrats and the Republicans sit fairly close to tied (with Obama with a slight lead).
The answer is simple-- the more dramatic and controversal the political news, the more views the news programs are going to have. If one of the candidates are 70%-30% in the opinion polls I can most certainly guarantee you that there is going to be far less intensity in the interest in political news as compared to a close 50%-50% split.
Current mainstream news reporting is not interested in thorough analysis or looking at information in an even handed manner. For example, looking back at the big controversy over Obama's "flag pin" issue during his run as Democratic party's presidential candidate, I would like to ask you as readers, was that controversy truly significant in the big scheme of things? I would answer that that the whole "flag pin" debaccle was irrelevant and neither Obama nor McCain wore a flag pin during their first debate last Friday. Yet, CNN and other news outlets actually went so far as to have "analysts" to come on to their show to actually debate whether if wearing or not wearing a flag pin on their suit is a sign of their patriotism for the country.
Seriously, what is the world coming to?
Perhaps I can illustrate my point using a different example.
Here's a billion (trillion) dollar question for you
What do you know about the sub-prime crisis? What are the terms of the bad mortgages that these people signed (general interest precenteges)? How many people took out these morgages? For the given interest rates, why were they too high?
Being honest, how many of these questions were you able to answer without looking anything up? If you're lucky, you might be able to answer 1 of them on the spot. But I highly doubt that any other questions can be answered without doing some real research.
The news has been spewing out to the general public for more than a year now about the sub-prime loan crisis and yet I find it particulaly hard to believe the general public does not have any tangible knowledge about the problem. I'll be honest myself, even I don't know how many people took out these loans off the top of my head from what I've seen from the news... over the past year!
I think this is utterly pathetic.
Why I've stopped caring about debates
I used to enjoy debating, but not anymore, especially after studying science and engineering.
Debating is less about coming to a consensus and far more about appearing to be "right" about whatever position that you're arguing for. This is the fundamental thing I dislike (ie. hate with a passion) about debates.
Debating automatically puts people into a defensive/offensive posture, where victory is making the most convincing argument. So what about the case if your position was wrong? Would you still try and argue that you are/were "right" to the ground? It is the nature of a debate that prevents people to admit that they were wrong and build a consensus.
Engineers and scientists don't debate. They may have unproven ideas and hypothesis', but the proof of everything comes out of the experiment, where everyone can do the experiment and everyone can come to the same result. I doesn't matter how right or wrong your idea seemed at the time, the only real thing that matters is if the results match up with your ideas.
The real recipe for progress in my humble opinion is far less about who does what, but rather about what gets done and I am afraid that this is a key point that few, if any politician understands. Compare the number of "political achievements" versus the number of "scientific/technological achievements" and their pervasive impacts on society, science and technology would win hands down. I believe that ought to say something about the difference between the "political vs scientific" process (and yes, I will admit that there is some "politics" in the scientific process, but far less compared to "normal" politics)... but I digress. So where were we... ah yes... about debates and the farce called the news.
So let me ask you, after all the debates you have seen on TV, whether be it the presidential debates or the "analysts" on the news shows you might have seen, how much more well informed have you become? What concrete conclusions have you drawn from what you've seen? If you can't answer these question now or can't ever make use of what use of what you've seen on the news in your life, then what you've seen was complete and utter waste of time.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
But for all controversies or crisis', the one thing I hate the most about the way current news is being reported is all of these so called "analysts" that come onto the show and have some kind of contrived debate for all of 5 to 10 minutes where the reporter pretends to ask superficially important seeming questions and have the analysts bash their heads against each other. The segment ends with no sort of consensus or any conclusion.
I would say that the whole point of the whole exercise is to "stir shit up." Complete and utter garbage in my not so humble opinion.
But this is pretty much what the whole news business is all about.
A Conflict of Interest
If there is anything good for news ratings, it all about controversy. The news could give less of a damn about coming to sound conclusions or justly educating their viewers.
The current US election cycle is a prime example of this phenomenon. I will disclose that I have positive bias to Obama, the Democratic candidate. Before the beginning of the election cycle and the exceptionally low approval ratings of the current administration (dipping to the 28% range!) it simply baffles me as to how can the current opinion polls between the Democrats and the Republicans sit fairly close to tied (with Obama with a slight lead).
The answer is simple-- the more dramatic and controversal the political news, the more views the news programs are going to have. If one of the candidates are 70%-30% in the opinion polls I can most certainly guarantee you that there is going to be far less intensity in the interest in political news as compared to a close 50%-50% split.
Current mainstream news reporting is not interested in thorough analysis or looking at information in an even handed manner. For example, looking back at the big controversy over Obama's "flag pin" issue during his run as Democratic party's presidential candidate, I would like to ask you as readers, was that controversy truly significant in the big scheme of things? I would answer that that the whole "flag pin" debaccle was irrelevant and neither Obama nor McCain wore a flag pin during their first debate last Friday. Yet, CNN and other news outlets actually went so far as to have "analysts" to come on to their show to actually debate whether if wearing or not wearing a flag pin on their suit is a sign of their patriotism for the country.
Seriously, what is the world coming to?
Perhaps I can illustrate my point using a different example.
Here's a billion (trillion) dollar question for you
What do you know about the sub-prime crisis? What are the terms of the bad mortgages that these people signed (general interest precenteges)? How many people took out these morgages? For the given interest rates, why were they too high?
Being honest, how many of these questions were you able to answer without looking anything up? If you're lucky, you might be able to answer 1 of them on the spot. But I highly doubt that any other questions can be answered without doing some real research.
The news has been spewing out to the general public for more than a year now about the sub-prime loan crisis and yet I find it particulaly hard to believe the general public does not have any tangible knowledge about the problem. I'll be honest myself, even I don't know how many people took out these loans off the top of my head from what I've seen from the news... over the past year!
I think this is utterly pathetic.
Why I've stopped caring about debates
I used to enjoy debating, but not anymore, especially after studying science and engineering.
Debating is less about coming to a consensus and far more about appearing to be "right" about whatever position that you're arguing for. This is the fundamental thing I dislike (ie. hate with a passion) about debates.
Debating automatically puts people into a defensive/offensive posture, where victory is making the most convincing argument. So what about the case if your position was wrong? Would you still try and argue that you are/were "right" to the ground? It is the nature of a debate that prevents people to admit that they were wrong and build a consensus.
Engineers and scientists don't debate. They may have unproven ideas and hypothesis', but the proof of everything comes out of the experiment, where everyone can do the experiment and everyone can come to the same result. I doesn't matter how right or wrong your idea seemed at the time, the only real thing that matters is if the results match up with your ideas.
The real recipe for progress in my humble opinion is far less about who does what, but rather about what gets done and I am afraid that this is a key point that few, if any politician understands. Compare the number of "political achievements" versus the number of "scientific/technological achievements" and their pervasive impacts on society, science and technology would win hands down. I believe that ought to say something about the difference between the "political vs scientific" process (and yes, I will admit that there is some "politics" in the scientific process, but far less compared to "normal" politics)... but I digress. So where were we... ah yes... about debates and the farce called the news.
So let me ask you, after all the debates you have seen on TV, whether be it the presidential debates or the "analysts" on the news shows you might have seen, how much more well informed have you become? What concrete conclusions have you drawn from what you've seen? If you can't answer these question now or can't ever make use of what use of what you've seen on the news in your life, then what you've seen was complete and utter waste of time.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Tanking US Econonmy
It should be apparent that the US stock markets are taking, something that I have since long been expecting since last year. Debt owed by the individual is still far too high and the banks are laden with bad sub-prime loans which they still need to sort out.
With dropping housing prices, people walking away from their loans, the financial institutions that thought to buy these sketchy collateralized loans are getting bit in the ass when they cannot recover the money loaned. Expect the financial crisis to continue throughout the year, and as the US government and the Federal Reserve continually have to pump money into the financial markets, expect the US dollar to devalue further.
As large financial institutions, especially those that bought these sub-prime loan packages on margin (ie. a loan) are forced to write down their bad investments, they are likely to sell off stocks or other financial devices to make up for their losses to stay capitalized. There is a significant amount of volatility in the stock markets right now as a result of large sell offs which depress prices and people buying in to take advantage of cheap stock prices, driving the prices back up.
In short, expect a significant amount of volatility in the markets for atleast the next few months due to uncertainty of the financial institutions and how the government will respond.
Barring any catastrophic news in the next month or so, I believe that the stock market will recover temporarily. If there is a bounce in the next month or so, I will likely sell off some of my positions in the market and wait to figure out my next steps.
As of current, I find it rather hard to find any reliable sources of information because most financial sites are filled with plenty of headlines and very little analysis. Most news sources have been painting very optimistic outlooks of the economy (especially press releases from the US government) to prevent sellout fear/panic. In a sense, I do believe this behavior to be rather dishonest.
The US will not be recovering any time soon. I think it is rather likely for the US will stagnate for the coming years. High personal debt, increasing prices and a weakened production base from outsourcing will prevent a quick recovery in the economy.
Looking globally, I think that the Euro will continue to get stronger and there is a high chance that the Euro will take over the USD as the global reserve currency. Should that happen, the value of the Euro may increase somewhat as other counries buy into the Euro.
Developing nations with a strong production base will likely be the least impacted by the financial crisis as their economies should be able to produce for themselves and other markets even if the US economy continues to falter. The US, on the other hand is highly vulnerable as it is very reliant on other countries for production.
I wish I had more time to back up my comments with links, but as of recent, I haven't had much time to summarize my thoughts or keep track of what I have been reading due to being rather busy from work and havnig fun on the weekends.
For those in the stock market, good luck.
With dropping housing prices, people walking away from their loans, the financial institutions that thought to buy these sketchy collateralized loans are getting bit in the ass when they cannot recover the money loaned. Expect the financial crisis to continue throughout the year, and as the US government and the Federal Reserve continually have to pump money into the financial markets, expect the US dollar to devalue further.
As large financial institutions, especially those that bought these sub-prime loan packages on margin (ie. a loan) are forced to write down their bad investments, they are likely to sell off stocks or other financial devices to make up for their losses to stay capitalized. There is a significant amount of volatility in the stock markets right now as a result of large sell offs which depress prices and people buying in to take advantage of cheap stock prices, driving the prices back up.
In short, expect a significant amount of volatility in the markets for atleast the next few months due to uncertainty of the financial institutions and how the government will respond.
Barring any catastrophic news in the next month or so, I believe that the stock market will recover temporarily. If there is a bounce in the next month or so, I will likely sell off some of my positions in the market and wait to figure out my next steps.
As of current, I find it rather hard to find any reliable sources of information because most financial sites are filled with plenty of headlines and very little analysis. Most news sources have been painting very optimistic outlooks of the economy (especially press releases from the US government) to prevent sellout fear/panic. In a sense, I do believe this behavior to be rather dishonest.
The US will not be recovering any time soon. I think it is rather likely for the US will stagnate for the coming years. High personal debt, increasing prices and a weakened production base from outsourcing will prevent a quick recovery in the economy.
Looking globally, I think that the Euro will continue to get stronger and there is a high chance that the Euro will take over the USD as the global reserve currency. Should that happen, the value of the Euro may increase somewhat as other counries buy into the Euro.
Developing nations with a strong production base will likely be the least impacted by the financial crisis as their economies should be able to produce for themselves and other markets even if the US economy continues to falter. The US, on the other hand is highly vulnerable as it is very reliant on other countries for production.
I wish I had more time to back up my comments with links, but as of recent, I haven't had much time to summarize my thoughts or keep track of what I have been reading due to being rather busy from work and havnig fun on the weekends.
For those in the stock market, good luck.
Monday, September 08, 2008
A lull in writing
It's been a while since the last time I've done any serious writing. I was working on a complicated post just up until now but I simply could not bring my self to finish it because of all the different points I wanted to make and going everywhere with the post. In short, I've gotten rusty when it comes to writing.
It's what happens when you start slacking off on anything. Eventually, I do want to get back into writing well thought out articles. I am just going to have to make time and motivate myself to do.
I'll be back, later on.
It's what happens when you start slacking off on anything. Eventually, I do want to get back into writing well thought out articles. I am just going to have to make time and motivate myself to do.
I'll be back, later on.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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