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djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Aug
14
It’s the end of the world….
Category: Globalization, News, Technology | 
11 Comments
Our sexually crazy and confused friends over in Japan have decided to contribute to the end of humanity with the Honey Doll (warning link contains some images/sounds NSFW) :
Unlike the blowup doll everyone makes fun of, the Honey Doll is supposed to mimic real women. It looks real (or creepily almost real) and has real feeling breasts - or so I assume from the pictures since I can’t understand Japanese. It also make real orgasm sounds. So for loser guys who might spend a little more time finding a real woman, I think they may give up. And then there’s the stereotypical guy that doesn’t want to have to deal with a real woman and all her problems and just wants to have sex. I think it’s roughly the end of humanity……
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Nov
29
New Capitalism
Category: Financial, Globalization, News | Leave a Comment
With all of the job cuts being announced right before the holidays, I was wondering if it might be time for a new capitalism. Here’s a rhetorical question, what if the board lowered their salaries and the CEO’s salary instead of firing people? A typical CEO for these big companies like Delta makes a few million. He or she doesn’t need millions - no one does! Somewhere around $50k can allow someone to survive in the US. $100k is very comfortable depending on the housing market. Certainly, $500k could be enough to live VERY well, even in New York. Let’s say they are firing white collar workers who each make $50k. If the CEO were to lower his salary by just $500k, he could save 100 jobs! If we’re talking about people who make less money, even more jobs could be saved! So why can’t they do this? Well, obviously, no one would ever lower their own salary. But why isn’t there much of a public outcry? People are losing their jobs right before Christmas and these CEOs are flying around in private jets. I know we have even more ridiculous things like basketball players making millions, but I would assume that people would say stuff. For the first time today, I heard them say something on CNN this morning. Of course, it was 6 AM and no one was listening - it wasn’t repeated all day like their typical stories. I know it’s a bunch of BS, but I had to get this off my chest - it’s really been bothering me.
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Apr
6
If the world was a series of gas station….
Category: Books, Globalization, Politics, economics | Leave a Comment
I am coming to the end of the Lexus and The Olive Tree. In part three of his book, he had a very interesting analogy for the world’s economic systems. If they were a gas station….
Japan - the gas costs $5/gal, but there are five guys who service your car. They pump your gas, fill your tires, and clean your windshield. They are all guaranteed to have their jobs for life.
Europe - the gas also costs $5, but there is only one guy who is always telling you that his union contract says he only has to pump your gas, nothing else. He works 35 hours a week, gets 90 minutes for lunch and six weeks of vacation every summer. His uncle and cousin are across the street playing because they make more money on welfare than their last job.
Third world country - the gas costs $0.35, because it is subsidized by the government. Fifteen people work there and they are all cousins. Only one of the ten gas pumps work. The station is owned by a guy in Zurich who takes all the profit back to his own country. He never goes to the station and doesn’t know that many of the workers sleep in the garage and use the car wash to bathe in the morning.
Communism - the gas costs $0.15 cents, but there isn’t any in the pumps because two of the three workers are selling it on the black market. They still come in on Fridays to collect their paycheck.
US - the gas costs $1 and you have to do everything by yourself. But you are in charge. You can pump gas or wipe your windshield or do as you wish.
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Mar
31
I’m still listening to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I mentioned back back on 12 March, since it’s a massive 21 hour book. Today I heard what I consider to be one of the most interesting theories involving wars. The author of the book noticed that no two countries containing a McDonald’s in their borders had ever fought. In other words, if Country A and Country B both have a McDonald’s they won’t fight each other. If Country C didn’t have a McDonald’s, then it may be attacked by either Country A or Country B, or it may attack either of these countries. His main exclusion to this theory is that a Civil war doesn’t count, so the problems in Yugoslavia don’t disprove the theory. The author then took his theory to McDonald’s who then independently verified that no two countries containing a McDonald’s had ever attacked each other.
What does this mean? Is it just a coincidence that no two McDonald’s countries had ever fought? The author explains himself this way: McDonald’s is just a representation of a country achieving a critical mass of middle class citizens. Poor people can’t afford to eat McDonald’s often enough and rich people would probably eat higher quality food. Therefore, a McDonald’s franchise would only open up in a country with an entrenched middle class. As a generalization, countries with a large middle class are averse to war. They know that wars are increasingly devasting to even the victor.
A country’s economy cannot support an indefinite war (present Iraq conflic aside) and sooner or later the middle class will begin to complain to its officials to end the war. Additionally, when countries go to war, the uncertainty drives away investors and they take away their money with them. Therefore, it is in a country’s best financial interest to stay away from wars.
Although I would like to wholly believe the author of the book, his theory sounds eerily like two men he mentions in the book. These were both people who said in 1910 that war was over and there would never be another war again. Countries were too tied up in economics to wage wars and it would be devastating for both sides. Within just four years of that statement would be the first World War and more would die in that conflict than in all the wars before it. In fact, the men were right, the war decimated the European continent and its countries. Coupled with World War 2, Europe was left behind until very recently, allowing the US to become a world leader. I agree with the author of the book I’m listening to that it would be very chaotic if there were to be another world war. However, I am not so sure that the implication could be made that there would never be another world war.
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Mar
12
How Thailand’s crisis became the World’s Crisis
Category: Financial, Globalization, economics | 2 Comments
I recently began listening to an unabridged version of The Lexus and The Olive Tree and I must say that after about ten minutes of listening to the book, I’m quite disconcerted over the increasing connectedness of countries and their ability to affect each other. Allow me to illustrate this by paraphrasing the book’s opening story.
In 1998 the Thai government had been keeping the currency, Boht, valued at one US dollar. Banks and investment first in Thailand therefore were borrowing money from US banks for their ventures since US banks were much more stable. In August of 1998 the Thai government, for whatever reason, decided to no longer tie the values of the two currencies and the Boht fell to 30 Boht for 1 US dollar. The Thai banks now had to come up with a lot more money to pay back their loans to the US banks. A short time later, 56 of Thailand’s 58 major banks closed down. Over 20 thousand white collar workers in Thailand lost their jobs. Foreign investors began removing their money from developing Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and others. This would have only caused an asian recession except for the ties to Russia.
Russia was in quite a bad place in 1998. Most of the products domestically produced were actually negative valued goods. As the book explains it, “this means that a Russian made tractor was actually worth less when it was made. It would have been more valuable to the Russian government if it was made into scrap or never made at all.” The few successful firms in Russia were dodging taxes. Therefore Russia had two major sources of income: selling oil and other raw materials and selling government bonds. The bulk of their raw materials had been input into Southeast Asian countries which took the raw product and converted it into Tvs, radios, and other finished products they exported to other countries. As they went into recession they bought less and less raw product from Russia. In order to entice people to invest in their government bonds, Russia had been offering ridiculous interest rates of nearly 50%. Thus American banks were borrowing money from other American banks at 5% interest, investing it in Russian bonds, and making a fortune. That is to say, they were making a fortune until Russia decided to default on their bonds. Basically, they told all the investors they were SOL.
This moved the problem over the America where the banks which had borrowed money at 5% expecting a 50% return now had to pay back that money with 0% return. They began to sell the bonds they had in good countries to pay off their debts. This transmitted the problem to countries like Brazil which had done nothing wrong, but suddenly saw people dropping the stocks and bonds in their country. Desperate for investment, they began to offer crazy interest rates too.
Investors, hungry for a safe investment, began to invest wildly in the US, driving interest rates low. This caused banks to panic, fearing that Americans would pay off their home loans early, cutting off an important source of income for them. Meanwhile, oil prices were dropping, bad news for Middle Eastern countries.
That is about the place where I stopped listening to the book, but I was amazed at what had occurred. A seeminly innocuous decision by the Thai government caused a cascade which ended up affecting the entire world.
I’m not yet ready to offer up a real opinion about this globalization. On the one hand, it’s getting worse and worse every day, with countries becoming very entangled in each other’s affairs. However, is there a way to put up controls and safety nets? Or would these controls do more harm than good? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that occurred. For example, tarriffs, which protect domestic goods from cheaper foreign goods, end up hurting the country trying to export its goods. In the early history of the US, these tactics led to economic wars that, in the long run, only hurt all players involved, including the country imposing the tarriffs.
As I continue to listen to the book, I will be able to offer up a more informed opinion. If the book continues to be as exciting as these first few pages were, I may be blogging about it quite a bit more.
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