Yet another wonderful deed aimed to save the environment.
Refer to the Economist's special report on a German town called Sieben linden, where people put consumption and waste a top issue on their collective conscience.

Economist Article

It's all very good. I always fail to explain myself clearly enough on issues of philanthropy and environmental issues, probably because I'm not entirely sure of it myself. Or worst still, the people who are actively involved, failed to convince me as I'm not quite sure if they know what they are doing.

On the Sieben Linden eco-town issue. For the people who live in the town, it's nice and comfortable, and doing something like this feeds their conscience well. But for the rest of humanity, it's almost pointless. Repeat, other than an interesting intellectual exercise, it's almost pointless.

Germany is one of the most developed industrial countries in the world, and they get here by creating and exporting wonderful machines, those powerful engines who create the main pollutants of the world. I'm not using the same sentimental judgement on the environmentalists, but the fact is, without the abundance of wealth and technology accumulated over the decades, this place called Sieben Linden would never have come into existence.

It doesn't matter how Utopian a life the eco villagers live, they are living under the social wellfare system of Germany, and they are educated by the wonderful German education system. Hence they created this town by choice, not by necessity; which is another way of saying they get what they want and not what they need. African villages do the same kind of things, but out of necessity, they are too poor to do otherwise; they are not as inspiring as an eco message because, well, they are not Germans who choose to abandon their BMWs, but in terms of sustainability and innovation it's much much more respectable.

One may think that it's ok to pursue what they want if the subject is something good for the planet; tell that to the banks and investment funds and insurance companies who invented the great mathematical tool to combine toxic assets and create AAA bundles, just a couple years ago they must have been thinking they are doing the humanity a favour by utilizing economic resources that would otherwise have been lying around doing nothing.

The truth is, reality is simple, having been pretty much the same for millions of years; humanity is simple, too, having commited pretty much the same mistakes for thousands of years. But when the later tries to intervene with the former with their limited wisdom and means, complicated and unforeseeable results will come about. Think recycling bins in some cities where the gabbage ended up in exactly the same piles as the rest; think solar panels and wind technologies that inspired forward thinking capitalists to invest heavily on, only to coincide with this God forsaken depression, with oil price a third of what it was last year; think the healthy way of diets, inspired restaurants like Wagamama, with its tasteless low fat and high fibre menu, closing down like mad when people, after another day of gloomy market results, attracted by the heavenly smells of pure fat from China Town.

Think George Bush, wanting to grab control of some oil, ended up burning dollars in trunks of trillions.

the difference between being in a plague and just being human

An incident happened in C's mini today. S started to scratch her arms, suspicious of bug or mosquito invasion. One of a few things could be true. S could have gotten the bites before she went into the car, she could have gotten it in the car, or she could have gotten it ages ago but did not notice until she was in the car. But in any case, sitting next to her I saw the reaction of S, and I, having experienced itchiness before, started to feel, or maybe not, something. When C asked if anyone felt their eyes itchy, I immediately responded. Subconsciously I was already suspecting being the victim of a certain infection that was originated in the mini.

These may well all be true, but on the other hand, it may well all be psychological. People do throw up when they see other people throw up, people do get turn on when they watch porn (watch the action, feel the itch), similarly, other things like advertising, or market reactions, all work on similar patterns.

This is called being human.

Think about the alternative, what if there is indeed some sort of infection in C's mini and we are all, with different symptoms, infected. S's reaction is a healthy alarm that warns all three of us the danger, encouraging us to seek for solution, e.g. in the form of medical assistance. But having lived 20 odd years we all tend to not make a fuss about small things like these, so we bear with it, we tell our minds that it's just psychological and chemicals are generated to block our bodies' reception to the itchy signals. But the fact is that we are all infected, possibly with something serious.

The next day, when I and C feel the itch on our arms when we wake up and start scratching, we both tell ourselves that it was probably the pancakes that we ate the night before, or still, lingering psychological effects from yesterday's experience.

And then the itchiness disappeared. And without thinking about it, we all travel in the same mini again. and again. and again.

Until one day I died. Suddenly. Allegedly without warning.
The doctors were confused. There was no diagnosis, not yet. But in the mind of C and S they both well know what the hell is going on and they panicked, really really, panicked.

Some people say we have already seen the worst of the financial crisis. That is like saying that, in this little shitty story of mine, we've seen the worst after I died.


And of course, there is also the possibility that C's itchy eyes, S's itchy arms, and my death, are mutually unrelated events. What the doctors can do, as a result, are, at the best, guess work.

Good luck with our banks.

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.