Got kicked out of Bomber!

Last bomber ever.
Got kicked out. But, I won an MP3 player. yay!

Jimmy stole my LOTR DVDs!!

I couldn't believe it. I came into the house and James passed me a nickel. Then after I had put the nickel in my nickel box, he comes into my room and is like "You stupid mother fucker. Give me my Nickel back!!". To which I replied "I'm sorry James, I cannot. I have put it away". Then he says "Fine Asshole, I'm taking your movies!!" So he took them and I had to defend my property.
Alas, I was successful.

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4286755
Interesting article supporting my argument about China not being the great investment opportunity that some people think it is.

Playing to Win. The right way.

There is an article in the Financial Post today in the Comment Section entitled 'Playing to Win'. It was written by George Stalk a senior business consultant in Toronto. It's an interesting read; basically, Georgie is arguing that companies best serve their shareholders, the environment, indigenous peoples, and their employees when they are fighting tooth and nail to produce products while disregarding all of the externalities they cause. He argues that the best companies are the ones who focus on dominating the market instead of being a good corporate citizen and growing slowly. Unfortunately, his examples don't really make much sense. Ie. Wal mart not paying employees much, and... actually that's his only example, he then says something about Wal Mart being dominant. Yay, one example. To quote Georgie:
"Assume two companies both play by the rules. One company is highly focused on dominating the market; the other company is focused on increasing its market share by some marginal percentage, while being the kind of "good corporate citizen" that will win favour with the popular business press and consumer and political activists. You can be certain of this: First, the company focused on creating, and exploiting its competitive advantage will grow, prosper and crate more profits and jobs than the company worried about it's image."
Assume one company is focused on dominating the market (General Motors) and the other company is focused on increasing market share by some marginal percentage (Toyota). Wait Georgie, your argument just fell apart. Nice timing with the Article: The day after GM announced that it had to cut it's profit projection in half and today Toyota announced the opening of it's New F1 facility that it built with it's cash. In fact, Toyota makes so much money being a "good corporate citizen" which it then lends out to other companies that, in Japan, it is viewed as almost a central bank.
Way to go Georgie, dumbass.

On being poor

Well, I know I can't actually complain about being really poor. I was looking around our house. Right now, there are 3 guys sitting on nice couches working on laptops, surfing the internet wirelessly while watching one of our several hundred cable channels on a flatscreen TV.
But. I really have no money. So poor!!!
Anyways. That's about all I have to say. It's St. Paddy's day and I've been dipping into the homebrew.
Adios.

The Corporation

So I watched the documentary "The Corporation" yesterday. It was kind of a terrifying movie. Especially since I'm in business. But, it was very provocative. I agree with some of the points in the movie: that governments need to take more control representing the interests of the public against corporations and that if corporations are going to exist as a legal 'person' they should also be able to face the consequences that a legal 'person' would, otherwise they are designed to perform unethically. However, they don't make much of a point talking about the many positive benefits of the corporate world. They do mention them though, and so in this I feel the film deserves a Kudos. They also don't talk very much about the companies that already follow the 'sustainable' lifestyle and the side effects that they get. For instance, Toyota is extremely environmentally conscious, treats their full time employees exceptionally well, gives everyone in the plants a say and a way to make things better, and they make more money than Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler and Volkswagen COMBINED while doing it. However, Toyota is the exception rather than the rule and there are changes that could be made to the corporate structure that would be better for everyone.
But, the arguments about companies continually moving to the next cheapest economy, I fear, may soon become horribly out of date. To the detriment of the developing world there is a good chance that companies will begin moving manufacturing back the US in the near future. The threat doesn't come from protectionism or crazy texans, but rather, technology.
As soon as product control robots come down in price to the point where they can operate cheaper than an employee in the third world. Cormpanies will begin moving production back to the US so that they are closer to their target markets. I'm worried that this will happen before China gets much of a chance to stand on, and then, suddenly it's whole economy will crash in a very catastrophic fashion. Mix this fear in with the fear of state-control, currency-fixing and them threatening war on their neighbors and I, as an investor, want nothing to do with the Chinese boom.
I think that countries that can offer semi-skilled to skilled workers at cheap will be the ones to benefit. So, China may not lose out completely, but they are not as close as Mexico or even Brasil where similar skills can be found.
Thus, I would rather invest in new robotics and expert systems technologies than in an emerging market that is standing on wobbly legs.

Update

Well, grad ball was fun. I could have used a bigger meal though. Much bigger. They gave us some nice glasses to take home, but since I'm not much one for heirlooms I gave mine away. I'd probably break them anyway.
Oh, and I hit a skunk with the ridesafe van tonight. Yay me.

Thought processes

I've been thinking about how some people are supposedly 'smarter' than others. I wonder if it actually has anything to do with actual brain 'horsepower' or more about the models that we use to analyze information. I mean, if 2 cars have the same horsepower and one has to go on a windy course while the other goes on a straight course, the one on the straight course will win. It could be that so called 'smart' people think with models that allow them to a)handle more information at once and b) process the information more efficiently. And, of course, all of this is done without trying. Smart people just are smart, they don't know why. And of course, some people aren't as smart at somethings as they are at others. Guass could bury almost any and everyone at math, but he couldn't punch his way out of a paper bag. Mohammed Ali instinctively created new boxing techniques that he used to destroy men twice his size, but there's no indication he could do long division. If we could actually identify and train the models they use to analyze information, maybe someday we will all be as smart as Guass in math, Shakespeare in language and Mohammed Ali in the sweet science.

Avi Lewis

Well, it's the night before my Bus468 midterm is due so naturally I decided to go to a guest speaker event and delay any more actual work.
The talk was by Avi Lewis, filmmaker, journalist, socialist. While I agree with a lot of what he said the way that he presented the material that irked me. He seemed to spend a lot of time attacking captialist structures, and quoting sources that are at best economically illiterate, and quoting a lot of stats without quoting their sources. He also tried to impress us with some flawed logic about how lower personal savings and higher corporate profits is a bad thing. But, all I could think is that corporate profits are higher BECAUSE savings are lower. Instead of investing people are taking advantage of record low interest rates to buy stuff. Would he rather people had high savings and low corporate profits? Then all of the companies could go bankrupt and we wouldn't have any jobs and we could just be Japan.
But, he made some good points about tax rates and things. Unfortunately he wrapped it all up in socialist rethoric. It almost seems as if he's a capitalist trying to appeal to socialists.
K. Back to work.
Ernie

World Wrestling Entertainment

Finishing off a walksafe shift that I didn't know I had until this afternoon. Apparently I accepted the shift from one of my friends last friday. Unfortunately, I had been indulging in my homebrew and had forgotten about the shift. Fortunately, he saw me in the gym today and reminded me. I spent some time on the shift sitting in Village 1 watching wrestling. I forgot how outrageous the show is; truly a spectacle.
Today was a pretty big day. I did 2 things that will have a huge impact on my life. One was submit my intent to graduate form. So, assuming I don't fail anything, I will graduate in June. The other was submitting my military application. I'm still not 100% sure that it's what I want to do, but if I don't apply I don't get the chance to do it at all. The guy from Clarica also called today. Apparently I was mistaken. They did want to interview me for a position in Waterloo. I guess they assumed that just because this city has eaten 5 years of my life and I currently live here that I want to work here. Except my application was for Vancouver. They say I need to do that interview in Vancouver, so I'll need to schedule it for the roadtrip.
I also happened to see some Lou Dobbs on CNN tonight. What a dumbass show. A bunch of people wrote in about how jobs are getting shipped overseas and it's destroying the American middle class. Right, the number of jobs getting created in the US vastly overwhelms the number of jobs getting shipped overseas. Unfortunately, it doesn't overwhelm the number of jobs replaced by technology. And even with the small volume of outsourcing and the large volume of job displacement, the American job market is still a fairly good place. If only Americans weren't so good at inventing new technology. I guess a bunch of people who are bitter their jobs rolling cigarettes for Players have been taken over by a machine that can roll cigarettes have decided to get mad at Indians for some reason. I'm not sure if that sentence made sense or not.