Category: Economics

Categories
Economics Environment Liberty Politics & government

[539] Of suspension news and an idiotic messenger that refuses to get to the goddamned freaking point

I was rather furious upon learning that Malaysian Deputy Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk S. Sothinathan is being suspended from his post because he questioned the Malaysian government’s position on issue regarding de-recognition of an Ukrainian university.

Quoting The Star:

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz said Sothinathan “broke ranks with the front bench” when he stood up in the Dewan Rakyat to question Dr Latiff over the CSMU issue.

Following the ruckus, Nazri said he had informed Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, who is the Barisan Whip, of the incident.

“I provided the tape and Hansard of the proceedings to Datuk Seri Najib for him to have a look at it so that he can inform the Prime Minister,” he told a press conference at the parliament lobby.

It seems that when one joins the government, one doesn’t have the leisure to have diverging views, much less question any of the government’s policy. So much for a democratic society.

After reading The Star’s article concerning the issue however, I’m not sure whether I should be more mad at the government or The Star. No thanks to the The Star’s article, I had to read eight goddamned paragraphs in order to learn why Datuk S. Sothinathan is being suspended.

Eight! Reuters on contrary needs just a paragraph to answer the goddamned why. And Jeff Ooi, which is a blogger, does a better job at reporting the issue than The Star, which is a national newspaper.

Point to The Star – get to the goddamned freaking point, punk! What the hell the editors at The Star are doing anyway?

p/s – just a few days ago, I found out that the relationship between pollution and environment is described in Kuznets curve. I talked about relationship between development and environment at length in two posts (here and here) only to find out that somebody had proposed it years earlier. It could easily have been Hafiz curve or something. Sigh…

LOL!

Categories
Economics

[535] Of another victory for free trade

Amidst the Europhobics’ victory cries and even some ridiculous calls for a return of the Franc and the Deutsche Mark, there is a good news originating from the middle of Europe.

Switzerland has voted to join the Schengen zone.

Signaling Swiss desire for closer integration with the EU, about 55 percent of voters, or 1.47 million people, supported joining Europe’s passport-free “Schengen” zone by 2007.

Hail to free trade.

p/s – and yeah, today’s World Environment Day. Then again, everyday is Earth Day.

Categories
Economics Society

[534] Of Friday sermon at Ann Arbor Islamic Center

Every Friday around noon, I’m supposed to attend a Friday prayer at a nearby mosque. I have not missed any one yet lately, save the one day that I departed for San Francisco.

As it typically goes, there is a sermon prior to the actual prayer. Unlike in Malaysia where the sermon is almost for certain boring, politically biased and lacks logical flows, the sermon at Ann Arbor most of the time gets the wheel inside of my head cranking. The sermon is interesting because most of the time, it relates to issues that I follow.

Lately however here in Ann Arbor, the Friday sermon has somewhat become a fundraising session. Every recent Friday sermon that I’ve attended as far as I can recall, the sermonizer will start on how donating is good and god will reward a person that gives in the afterlife and what’s not. The sermonizer will continue rambling until a punch line – “there is a poor community in Charlotte, South Carolina that is building a mosque” or “your brothers and sisters in Columbus, Ohio need your help to complete an Islamic center”.

I have nothing against fundraising. As I wading through a very difficult jungle out there, I do see how almost everything needs capital. The statement becomes especially true when it concerns religion. No matter how much cash is thrown into the mosque, the church, the temple or anything, it will needs more and more money. Plus, a couple more cents.

However, I feel it is outrageous to see somebody explicitly soliciting for monetary contribution during a Friday sermon. In my opinion, an announcement before or after the whole praying session would suffice. A flier would suffice. A sandwich man would serve the purpose too. Imagine a sandwich man wandering around soliciting for donation at religious sites – would love to see that!

I don’t know. I don’t get myself involve into the local Muslim community too much. Perhaps that might nullify my opinion. Nevertheless, seeing a sermon session becoming a soliciting session is distasteful.

Oh, well. I guess I should be looking forward to attend another fundraising session before performing the Friday prayer, or I could skip the soliciting session, or, skip the prayer altogether and play Warcraft 24/7 until I rot in hell.

But I wonder, if I had stopped attending the prayer because I hate the sermon cum soliciting session, would I pull the sermonizer cum solicitor into hell with me?

This of course, assuming that God exists, I’m in the right religion, heaven and hell exist, blah, blah, blah…

Categories
Economics Environment

[532] Of the next step

The Kyoto Protocol has been in force for than three months now. I haven’t read much development on it save that some countries are planning to leave the Protocol and its legacy behind after it expires. They say it is too costly to do a Kyoto part two. At the same time, I doubt many parties of the Protocol will be able to meet the reduction goal by the year 2012.

Don’t get me wrong. Though Kyoto is not as effective as most would want it with people on one side says it’s too costly and the other saying too little too late, it is still an important step to be taken. It essentially set the pace towards greener future.

But still, one will have to wonder what is going to happen after Kyoto. Many have mentioned the need to get China, India and other developing nations to join hand in hand. But whatever is going to happen, I’m noticing a new trend in combating climate change.

Kyoto has been targeting governments. Maneuvering with such target in mind is hard given the fact that the Protocol almost died with the pullout of the US. The Protocol only got through with Russian ratification.

The near death experience probably made a lot of people to have a second thought. Hence, attention has shifted from government to organizations down the hierarchy – states, cities, private firms.

Some states in the US have their own initiative to reduce emission despite the federal government refusal to ratify Kyoto. Development in those states, California in particular has been rather encouraging. California, San Francisco in fact, has always been a leader when it comes to taking care for the environment. When I was in San Francisco, I saw first hand why – large fleet of its buses is zero-emission buses, electrically powered. I have not seen anything like it before.

Today, UN World Environment Day that is be held in San Francisco. Though the conference itself is not about climate change in particular, it will however touch on renewable energy and in general, sustainability, which go in line with methods to cut emission down.

And all these sustainability ideas won’t come true without the green technologies which come from many firms such as Toyota, Honda and General Electrics. General Electrics lately has been campaigning hard to reinvent itself as a green company. Its Ecoimagination campaign to me is impressive so far. I’m not however sure whether this is a real effort or simply another green-washing as done by Exxon and others.

Yet, all of the steps and trend is useless if there is no green grassroots. Then again, these green steps started because of expanding green grassroots. What makes me wonder is how the green grassroots started and then skipped everything between private citizens and the governments. It is weird to see only after the jump was made, everything in between starts to build up.

But in the end, it is good to see green ideas are being embraced by the bases and more importantly at the moment, privates firms. I’d guess it is not too premature or showing too much confidence to say, welcome to the green century, despite the death of environmentalism.

Categories
Economics Gaming Humor

[529] Of auctioning in World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft in-game economy is confusing to say the least. To be fair, it’s confusing at the first glance and it will make sense after awhile.

While I was browsing an in-game auction house for materials that I needed to brew a few potions, I found that that the price of the end product is lower than the total cost of materials needed to make the end product. I’ve heard about this phenomenon earlier in World of Warcraft forum but never really had the curiosity to investigate it myself. I was more interested in killing some other players and brag about it. But

For instance, to make a major healing potion, one needs mountain silversage, two golden sansams and a crystal vial. When I checked the price of silversage, it was priced at 99 silver (1 gold = 100 silver = 1000 copper). According to a census by Allakhazam, the average price is 72 silver. A sansam costs 39 silver on average while a crystal vial cost 20 silver from an NPC vendor.

And guest how much, on average, does it cost to buy a major healing potion.

If you’d guess around 1.70 gold (which comes from 72 + (39*2) + 20), you’re wrong. On average, the potion costs just 1 gold.

Funny isn’t it?

This sort of pricing is ruining my in-game profession, which is an alchemist. I gather all the materials and make those materials into potions. Most of the time, I buy the materials instead of looking for them. Gathering the materials takes extensive effort.

By looking at the current trend, it seems that I should simply collect the materials and immediately later, sell them straight to the market instead of using up the materials for potions and then offer the market the end product. This is a way to get around the weirdness of the in-game economy. But it certainly doesn’t explain the anomaly of the economy.

One explanation for what seems to be a weird pricing is that some sellers actually gather (or in fact, gotten it for free) the material instead of buying it off from someone else. With that, their cost, strictly speaking from monetary perspective while ignoring the effort needed to search for the materials, is lower than those that get their material from the market.

This explanation makes perfect sense. However, I wouldn’t these people that gathered the material by themselves gain higher mark-up if they had priced their items as if they had bought it from the market? Shouldn’t more profit and more gold be the goal? Moreover, these sellers don’t seem to add their effort into the price, which is ludicrous. As if, their effort shouldn’t be rewarded. Or maybe they just have different preferences, which is generally lower than those that think like me.

Because of these people, which I call “deflationers”, prices of everything related to alchemy are deflated, save those highest levels potions. In the end, every decent alchemist is forced to sell at lower prices.

Then, I realized, this is game theory, with a pun.

p/s – Leeeeeerrrroooooyyyyy Jeeeenkiiinnsss. Warning, large vid file. 16 meg.