Author: Hafiz Noor Shams

For more about me, please read this.

Categories
Economics Environment

[1001] Of a better and humane alternative to crows culling

Several of weeks ago, I had a meeting with a few people — Shin and Khalid Jaafar were two of them — at Bangsar. While committing myself to an impossible search for a parking space there, I saw a Kuala Lumpur city hall squad shooting down crows. There were countless of crows hovering the area at that time, producing annoying noise. It’s easy to hate the crows for that. While I agree that the noise is a nuisance, I completely disagree with the scourge. The city hall was, and very likely, is, attending to the symptoms, not the root cause. Therefore, there’s a better way to deal with the crows, as a friend advised me during the meeting.

First of all, it’s important to realize that crows in urban areas are scavengers. Despite the negative connotation the noun scavengers brings, scavengers, crows included, play important role in our ecosystem. Scavengers are practically cleaners, breaking down our food leftovers. As scavengers, crows are attracted to the leftover, essentially waste. Our environment as a whole would be a very bad place to live in without scavengers.

It’s highly likely that the reason why the flock of crows hover Bangsar, or any area of that matter, is the presence of waste. Hence, if city hall is really interested in solving the problem, city hall should clean up the waste produced by Bangsar, which is an affluent area. Or better yet, if the population and visitors of Bangsar wants to solve the problem, they will need to clean up.

The culling is barbaric, regardless whether it happened in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. This is on top of the fact that the culling is ineffective and wasteful exercise, by the very fact that the act of culling attacks the symptom, not the root cause.

Categories
Liberty This blog

[1000] Of I have gained this by philosophy

Celebrating the 1,000th post. Celebrating five years of the __earthinc.

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

— Aristotle (384 BCE — March 7, 322 BCE)

The ability to differentiate right and wrong by appeal to the mind; appeal to rationalism; that is the highest of all morals.

Categories
Photography

[999] Of a photo from Istana Seri Menanti

Another photo from a dinner:

Some rights reserved. By Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams.

Yeah. I know. Weird photo.

Categories
Liberty

[998] Of take heart, libertarians

Several of my friends told me that I could be excessively pessimistic sometimes. I assure them that it’s not my nature to be as such but rather, my environment forces me to be as one. As a green observing the degradation of the environment on daily basis, at the same time, as a libertarian witnessing the trampling of liberty almost everyday in this country, life is hard for me to swallow. It’s doubly hard for me when I see my friends giving up the fight for liberty and migrating away to freer lands abroad, leaving me and the rest behind to fight a war all alone.

Whenever I see friends or even strangers migrating away, saying they have undergone enough injustice, I become bitter. Even envious at times. After all the implicit agreements to come to each other’s aid in the face of gross injustice, appealing to camaraderie based on liberty, quitting the fight by migrating away is a breach of that agreement. Of course, I fully agree that a person’s free to do whatever he so wishes with his person and property as long as he respects others’ liberty to do the same, as any libertarian would say, but trust is something fragile. Once broken, it takes time to rebuild. Disappointment takes toll on trust.

Though you’re leaving this land behind, looking forward for better future abroad, where life is systematically fairer, where liberty is relatively cherished, pursuing happiness that all libertarians dream of, at the very least, don’t forget those of us that choose to guard a bastion of freedom in this liberty-forsaken land. Come to our aid when need be. Stay true to your words, even if you choose to leave, for liberty’s under assault and we need every man available to guard the wall of our fort from tyrannical individuals.

Have you not the heart for sympathy for us? Are you apathetic to the pain your fellow libertarians undergo while defending liberty? Have you seen the oppressed of the past? We, right here, right now, are the oppressed and you and I know that.

The grass is greener on the other side, that much I admit and I do appreciate why you’re leaving. For I myself have experienced liberty in foreign land. It’s a path that I’ve gone through and can never turn back. The aftertaste is too strong to ignore. Once tasted, one forever longs for it the moment one parts from it. I truly understand that feeling. I had the chance to do the same thing, I could have adopted a faraway free land as my first home. I could have but something calls me back and that call places a burden on me to man the fort.

For those that plan to migrate away, please, I beg you, lend me your ears. Do not leave this land behind. However discouraging the situation might be, all isn’t lost yet. Hear me. For every bastion we surrender, is another bastion for tyranny!

Take heart, libertarians, friends. Take heart and stay. For if we make our stand, Fort Liberty shall stand proudly even amidst relentless bombardment. For if we make our stand together, we shall turn the tide that tyranny has forced upon us.

Categories
Economics Sports

[997] Of medals, population and wealth at the 2006 Asian Games

In the last Southeast Asian Games held in the Philippines, a Southeast Asian blogger suggested that there’s a correlation between the number of medals won by a country with the country’s population size and wealth. That sounds reasonable to me. With respect to the ongoing Asian Games at Doha, let’s test it.

Let’s touch on the data first. I use 2005 GDP at PPP (IMF) and population size of Asiad country-participants as listed at Wikipedia. The GDP at PPP is used as a proxy variable to wealth. Data on medals collected by countries as of 0400 Greenwich time is obtained from the official site of the 2006 Asiad. In order to differentiate between gold, silver and bronze, I assign three points to gold, two to silver and one to bronze. I have the all the data in one file and you may have it if you’d like to play around with it.

I got MS Excel to run the necessary regression. I know, it’s a bad choice but I don’t have access to other statistical software. I did download some free, legit softwares off the internet but that was too much hassle.

So, on MS Excel, I regressed medal points — number of medals multiplied by point assigned — on population per thousand and GDP at PPP per million.

Before I reveal the result, let’s talk about my initial hunch. I’d think population size and wealth have positive relationship to medals won by countries. To generalize it further, if we take medals won as a proxy to strength in sports, population size and wealth would contribute positively to countries’ strength in sports. What do you think about that?

Now, the result supports that wealth increases the number of medal won. Specifically, each billion of GDP at PPP leads to a 0.0008 increase in medal point, with all else constant of course.

The surprise comes from the correlation between population size and number of medal won. Each thousand leads to 0.0002 decrease in medal point; an inverse relationship, with the typical caveat, ceteris paribus.

The output:

Some rights reserved. By Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams.

Honestly, I’m kind of skeptical of my own regression.

Regardless, on a different set of regression – medal points on GDP at PPP per capita – reveals that a dollar increase in GDP (PPP) per capita increases medal point at about 0.0018, ceteris paribus. The regression result if you’re interested in it:

How significant are the figures?

Well…