Bob Nozick used to remark how when he was a kid he would like going around having an opinion on everything. I am not trying to have an opinion here, but I found the demonstrations amusing. Stepped out for lunch onto the main street outside the embassy today and there was this long line of trucks (with so many workers, so many many) with people holding signs like "f*** john richards" (nike's main representative for indonesia), "go to hell nike" and "nike = sweat shop".
of course what i found ironic is that if it were really a sweat shop, why are they demonstrating to get their jobs back? but i guess it's just emotion, and people say things when they're pissed off. it's impossible to trust anyone anyway, nike says the stuff was bad quality, could be true, maybe not. i'm not privy to case details. no opinion, just irony.
also why let us know? i don't recall nike being in our building, and last i heard nike wasn't a singaporean company. it would perhaps be more effective driving to the HQ and making the din there instead of wasting fuel driving around. but exposure is so important in this media mad country, and god knows what urban improvements they can make with the budget they spent on political banners. i have never seen something put up so efficiently before. i think the slogan should be, "i can make urban improvements as effectively as i put up banners."
lunchtime conversation of the day. very scary. must be careful of who you meet here. i tried to see what i could find:
http://www.baliblog.com/travel-tips/black-magic-in-indonesia.html
tried writing an article on wikipedia today. with the behemoth it's become, there's now a huge community of law enforcers. it can get rather stifling for creativity when your article is default-threatened with deletion a matter of seconds after you write it (making all that effort seem like a waste). last i heard the founder left, because there appears to be so much argument between the moderators. give someone power, i say, and they all become regulators. i guess i can understand that with all the reputation wanting to make sure it's neutral, accurate, and that is why it probably behaves differently from what it used to when it was an upstart. now it's cull, cull, cull and not create, create, create, but i tried to fill a gap. but still, when you want to know about something, it's the first website you go to for a summary. anyway. in addition to writing the article, i have to put up a justification for it. oh well. why do people do this for no pay? idealists or bored, all.
was surprised by the turnout of uzbek vs saudi. mainly because uzbek hit the post 5 times and had a goal disallowed the whole crowd was rooting for the. exciting
simple storyline, good old fashioned values and people going to poor places off the beaten track, gets me going everytime.
- newsweek article on "family" capitalism
argues that SEA is going down the path of latin america. interesting facts put forward: Singapore has the Gini coeffient of urban Argentina (?). Interesting opinion put forward: 2nd generation (or 3rd generation) family businessmen (sons) are better off going to law schools or making political connections than applying your latest McKinsey or Harvard MBA techniques for efficiency, because by definition, a sprawling conglomerate is not efficient. Make friends and keep the business, or streamline and lose most of it. Also of course argues such a holding structure is not efficient for the economy as a whole, but from a self-interest perspective, why should they stop themselves from helping themselves to the spoils.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19762114/site/newsweek/read this and the linked articles.
interesting because recently met some rich kids.
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