Bored. M - A - X Bored.

Saw Casino Royale with the guys the other night, apparently the bad guy's name is Le Chiffre, which sounds like Le GF, and I'm not suggesting any connection between the two.

Been listening to Bloomberg radio recently, it's almost funny. The American way of economic analysis is somwhere between a talkshow and a political speech, and I think someone mentioned something like this "oh, is this bad, no it is not bad enough yet, cos it ain't gonna be better and we ain't seen nothin yet, there will be BLOOD on the wall, there will be Blood on the ceiling, there will be Blood on the ground, there will be BLOOD everywhere" Which just feeds my scepticism about the whole american-ism and the well-dressed high street, i.e. most of them need to read more.

Speaking of which, Warren Buffet is a god, if not the god, in investments, the only thing that i can't understand is his choice of cherry coka cola as his favourate drink. I mean, coke is fine as long as he doesn't do his lines too often but cherry? Maybe it has some secret minerals in it that keep you from turning stupid, you know.

On a more serious issue, apparently some Asian countires have been talking about setting up an alternative to IMF, International Monetary Funds, an Asian version that specifically to suit the needs for Asian countries. What IMF does normally is, collects money from its member countries and uses it to assist other countries where there is need for an injection of cash (sounds familiar?), but based on the Bretton Woods system that was designed for Westerners by the Westerners, it did not really address the socio-political pictures in Asia, and judging by how well the Westerners are doing recently, Asia is playing its card, which is a good sign I guess, for the re-shuffling of the cards, will the world be divided into the trinity? Thou shall hope so.

Now, all eyes on the newly elected American president. Some say he's the hope, some say he's not going to change anything, I say sell US dollars and buy Chinese RMB. In my alternative parallel universe, Bush would have been elected this year and Obama would have been elected eight years ago, in which case both would have served their talents better.

Obama looks like an action driven kind of guy, who pays attention to details, because he's from a minority group and it was the attention to forgotten details that got him to where he is today, he would have been a good president in the last eight years of economic booms, he might even have prevented the meltdown. Bush on the other hand, is stupid, there's nothing wrong with it if one uses his stupidity strategically in the right context, now is the right time, for no logic nor wisdom can solve the problems as those that US is facing right now.

Oh, I heard the State of California is going broke. The essential problem for America is that it's too big and too liberal at the same time. If one is just big, like China, you are holding up fine, but if one has both qualities it is not going to solve anything because there are too many failed body parts that are asking for medical attention, the banks, the motor industry, health care, blahblahblah. I've become more patriotic as the day goes by, as the Chinese big shots would say, ok, everybody needs to chill, remember if all else fails we still have three trillion US dollars to throw away.

Apparently the new James Bond film which has been widely criticised for its lack of bed scenes and narrative strength turns out to be the most relevant of all Bond films. Ghana's government was forced by the World Bank to privatized its water companies, which resulted in the general decline in the water service in the nation due to the extremely low efficiency in working progress compressed by the lack of economic benefits. Families from rural areas have to travel miles and spend more than half of their daily incomes on drinkable water. There's no Mr. Bond in the picture but the World Bank does get condemnation that it's hypocritical, forbiding foreign countries to socialize their utilities industry to satisfy even the most basic human needs, but when it comes to high street, there's no hesitation to socialize their own banks.(refers to BBC Business Daily 021208)
I guess in times like these one should be grateful for things that one always takes for granted, and finds un quantum of solace from the re-assured knowledge that when one does turn on the tap today, he would still get the running water.

i've been trying to write something meaningful in the last few days.
but le girl friend has been occupying my mind to its full capacity, which is a good thing.

Have been reading Henri Lefebvre these couple of days. Have given Marxism some new thoughts. We grew up believing in what was told about Marxism. Now that i'm older and much more synical, some concepts need to be revisited. I think it's safe to say that i'm a freak.

Last night we were trashing aida's place to play Wii. I'm so getting one.

the lost time of the time to come

certain behaviours come forward whenever there is a lack of faith.

media coverage, for the sake of its definition, does not help, at all. their function is le catalyst. the age of media pushing forward humanity is not over, but fear hungers for information that feeds on its own fear. vicious circle. and media feeds to that.

government interventions are inevitable, even for the most anarchist minds. the foundation of free market, as far as i understand, is the collective behaviour of self-interests rather than altruism. Self interest means differences, a boundary that distinguishes one from otherness.

hence of course government will have to do something if it can, so as to define its one existence, that can be done and done by no other. i'm the boss. period. even though i may not know anything.

modernity made people believe in deliberate changes as the answer to everything, machines, laws, systemized morality, and therefore it is inherently contradictory to the idea of freedom. contrary to what the world of democracy tells themselves, what they are enjoying is not freedom, but leisure and complacency. and people are doing whatever they can do to keep that laziness.

i've been asking myself in recent weeks, is this the form of chaos that i so eagerly fanthomed? i found that it is not, on the contrary, things have become extremely predictable. something cannot be chaotic if everybody knows exactly what is going to happen, or can it? but we are just too scared and blind to admit it.

i'm feeling more optimistic as the days go by. amen.



m.

EXCHANGE RATE

Disclaimer: the intention of this article is for intellectual entertainment only, rather than serious economic and financial advices. Any consequences due to actions taken as a result of reading this article, or perceiving representations of this article through a third party, will not be the responsibility of the author.




Exchange rate can be in a simple way considered as a function of demand and supply between two currencies. Considering what money does essentially is to purchase local goods and services, including interest repayments due to savings in banks, an exchange rate really is just a love affair between two economies and the question is who's paying more for it.

Australian dollar plunged in the last couple of days because the world economy melt-down. No, really. Australia is a commodity based economy that sits on resources and energies. The world craves for aussie dollars whenever they want a new building built, or new cars, or railroads, because Australia has loads and loads of them, and what's more, because it is closer to the biggiest consumer of steel, i.e. China, than, say, India or Brazil.

But what happens with the current crisis is that the markets are expecting the economic developments globally to drop and the demand for these natural resources would be the first to plunge. So financial institutions seek for refuge away from commodity based economies and put their money away from the australian dollars to safer havens such as government bonds or precious metals.

The thing with market speculation is that the buying actions are always due to exaggerated greed and the selling actions are driven by blown up fear, so the actualized crash in the dollar value may not have honestly reflected upon reality. But the theory stays. There's no rush immediately to absorb aussie dollars even at these attractive levels, yet. Clouds of uncertainty should be expected to clear in the following week or two.

Some key things to pay attention to:
Oil price, commodity prices, Chinese building sector figures, but a rule of thumb is the oil price, wait for it to stablize, if it ever does.

starbucks

From a distance, the Starbucks model seems to be the ideal model of a market mechanism in this era. It is extremely big on one hand, being a multnational franchise with the maximum bargaining power for material prices, wages and resources allocation, extremely small on the other, being able to fit in any block of buildings on the planet with its green coloured logo and minimum requirements for spatial strategies.

It worked like magic in Asian cities, bringing the franchise an elite Manhattan fifth avanue aura to newly developed cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, powerful enough to slowly change the food culture in local cultures.

A friend of a friend visited Melbourne from Malaysia and over dinner in Tiamo we asked her what kind of coffee she liked. "Oh, you know, the Starbucks type" Silent for two seconds. we pursued further "what Starbucks coffee?" with a tone of sarcasm. But in fact it makes perfect sense, Starbucks offers coffee in a very efficient model, large cups, and a comfortable indoor environment where one will just go to read a book for hours without being bothered. In fact the company always proudly said that people will just pay to have the Starbucks experience without the coffee.

Then something interesting happened. Without any massive protest by the local community, quietly and slowly, on Lygon street where the coffee shops are everywhere, Starbucks closed down. The reason is quite obvious. The Starbucks model simply fails to capture the rhythm of the Carlton area. People don't grab and go with their hot cappucino as they do in New York, they expect good coffee, and what's more, friends and families come in small groups to dine on the street with an expectation of that noisy, human, sometimes slow Carlton-ness. People don't rush to anywhere after their caffeine fix. They look for cakes, flowers, books, movies, and sometimes nothing, just plain conversations with each other. It's almost the opposite of everything this international franchise provides.

Then I start to wonder if this can be that little niche for our observations and research. What the Google map shows and what it does not show. The rhythm of urbanity. Really small things that touch you. And really small things that connect with each other to form another sense of free market, in no way a market of homogeneous product providers. This is what we try to find from here, small things, which are also extremely large and solid things.



max.

can the economy be saved?


you know how every time something really really bad happened to the economy and a million economic experts will come out and say that how they all saw the signs and how it all made perfect sense, and what's more, how this crisis is totally out of hand and how the last one was so easy to solve.
the problem that lies in every crisis of course is that it cannot be anticipated and solved until it is imminent or until it hits. it's the BLACK SWAN theory, which simply points out that every time in human history a major event will happen that's totally out of the ordinary and will then shift the paradigm of the world. Linear thinking, hence logic, is not able to solve this type of problems, as it proposes to process information within the existing paradigm.
Well, all these are old news.

What i've been thinking is, maybe, just maybe, we are coming to a stage where everything that could happen has almost all happened. And as our coverage of these "paradigms" become more and more comprehensive and extensive the new and unknown "abnormal" events will be so out of the ordinary that we simply do not have the power to solve them. That is the Soros' theory of reflexivity essentially, only this time we are talking about the gap between human capacity and real life issues. The exponentially increased pressure from reality seems to have outpaced the adapting capacity of our intelligence and resources, and we simply cannot sustain the self re-inforcing trend that we have so-far more or less successfully sustained in the last two centuries.

That gap is further supported by two things that get us to what we are today, paradoxically, the invention of atomic bombs democracy. The former essentially rules out the possible solution of wars, and the latter almost always guarantees a solution that will satisfy the majority, and exclusively short-term. Which means that we cannot reduce the reality pressure by eliminating a selected population on the planet without running the risk of a total extinction, and any politician who has the guts to propose a difficult solution will be slaughtered by his own people.

so can the economy be solved?

what is time?

what is time?

there is no such thing as present. by default the time for our perception of the "now" is always a little bit slower than the actual happening of the "now". and so we view the presence of time always a hindsight, and never as a simultaneous perception of the situation.

Simplicity: as we define our time with seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, milleniums, and etc. we have effectively quantified the continuity of time (assumption) into integers. Most watches would have a smooth transition for the minute and the hour hands, but quantumized movements for the second hand. What the second hand does is the repetition of stop, move, stop move and etc. so in this way, time has been split into two types of moments, the stability moments as the second hand rests on whole numbers, and the transition moments as it moves in between.

It influences us on a number of different ways in terms of our perception of time. One is that time is quantified. Another is that time is divided into equal units. The theory of relativity had already discussed the later issue where time is in fact not consistent, that it is not the unshakable contant in our universe. For me the important inspiration from this theory is that time may end with matter, in a way that not only is it not linear nor consistent, it is not even a scale concept. It may be in possession of directions more than positive (future) and negative (past), and it is able to gain and lose momentum and weight. Just like forces.

And then we look at the former issue of quantified time. We all so stubbornly believe that the device of a clock or a watch is a measure of time, and sometimes even equalize the two concepts, whereas in fact all the artificial mechanism captures is a representation of our perceived time, and that perceived time is defined in the first place by our understanding of it. So on the centre of all things the actual time, then the effects of time as it takes place, then our understanding of it based on these perceptions, and then our way of capturing and representing that understanding of that perception.

Hence layers of gaps are created, between our understanding of the equilibrium and the actual happening of reality. The dangerous thing being we are not only constantly influenced by the representation of time, let alone time itself, but also constantly giving feedback to that so called reality by our methods of representation (clock), without being aware of the reciprocal interactions. That's how sometimes strange things happened to our perceptions, like memories of the past versus the memory of yesterday, where one perceives the former as significantly more important and closer than the latter even though the measurement of time suggests the opposite. We have distorted that equilibrium of time by magnifying or diminishing our conception of it, whereas on the other hand still comfortably believing that we are staying faithful to the iron law of consistency. Another example is with facial products. it works by bringing attention to the process of application, hence ritualized these short periods of putting cream on face into performances. That in itself creates a conception or misconception of enlarged time.




m.

oil price will hit 150 by the end of this month.

and then it will hit 165 by the end of July.

Then in August 8th Olympics games will come.

Some things might go wrong. The weather, for instance.

Some stupid western countries will boycott the game, at least for some of the atheletes.

then it'll be tension. then the stock market will go down, really down.

then the economy is in for an apparently painful correction,

but in fact it is good for the government because the alternative will be too scary.

then the oil price will go down. or not.

but if it does. it will drop to 120 in no time.

and then 100. or not.

this is the easy part. what will happen after that?