linterry's blogger

The fact that my girlfriend and I can't stop playing Warcraft together night after night... and the immense popularilty of the game worldwide and it's transmutation into a legitimate sport...just tells me one thing: Warcraft 3 is the product of Artistic Visionaries, not Trash-Capitalists.

Not the "that's so fucking weird" kind of art (like that German Nazi dude who preserves corpses as an art form), but art in the sense of perfection. WC3 is not really a groundbreaking game in terms of concept, but rather in terms of execution and refinement. It is remarkable that a strategy game in this day and age can manage to bring so much charming individuality to even the most insignificant of units. It is clearly obvious that it was not done under the pressure of a financial whip, but out of Passion.

Imagine you want to start a video game company. What is on the forefront of your mind?

1. To create a game for the love and passion of creating a game
2. To create the best game you can make with reasonably available resources and sell it to as many people as possible

While the two choices seem to be different representations of the same idea, they are in fact quite different. The first one focuses on the Game and the Game itself. The second idea is something you would find in a business textbook. It is tainted with the systematic, heartless methodologies of Capitalist Business Model.

In the end, two groups of equal intellectualal talent, the one which adopts the 1st idea is always going to produce an artistically superior product than the one which adopts the second. It may not sell as well or reap as many profits (possibly due to the unwillingness to sacrifice resources into Marketing), but from the end user's perpsective the difference in philosphy will certainly manifest itself as a "better" game. From a MBA grad's point of view, who only sees and cares about the financial numbers, it doesn't matter how "good" the game is, if it doesn't sell, it sucks. He will undoutedbly adopt the second strategy if such a character ever has a chance to manage a game company.

With the proliferation of MBA grads and "I wanna be rich and own a Porsche, Benz, and a BMW" youth, is it any wonder than the genuine quality of Artistic Products has suffered and the refinement of Marketing and Consumer Deceit has prospered?

Sadly, even when a team of Artistic Visionaries such as Blizzard manage to gather together in a world scathed with the Endless Capitalist Wars, they are not immune to the ill effects.

from http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/july03/billroper/

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GameSpy: There has been a lot turmoil surrounding Vivendi and the attempted sale of its game division. Blizzard, for the most part, though, was fairly autonomous. How did that turmoil affect the company and you and your departed colleagues?


Bill Roper: We have always tried to shield the development teams from the corporate process as much as possible so they could focus on making games. That being said, it was certainly becoming an increasingly difficult task in many regards. While I can only really speak for Blizzard North, the uncertainly surrounding our future in regards to who was going to own us understandably caused a lot of speculation and uncertainty. Our lack of participation in the process made it difficult for us to provide any insight to the people we worked with.

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I have recently developed a fascination for Karl Marx and his ideologies. It is hardly a practical matter, but rather an intellectual quest for a new perspective on economic and political systems.

I know nobody out there really gives a shit, but after like what must be at least 100 games... I finally got a perfect 10.0 rating with Henry in PES3



Only 3 goals, but somehow it adds up to a 10.0 performance. Must be the tackling/interception counts (not shown)

I just read this somewhere on the web:

I realized something. I used to play lots of video games. I never used to think about girls all the time. I used to be happy. Now, I don't play any video games. Now all I do is think about girls. And now, I'm not as happy as I used to be.

FUCK YEAH, can I ever relate to that. Well, maybe not now, because I've "solved" my girlfriend woes 1.8 years ago, but seriously, life was so much better without the hormone problems. When I did have the girlfriend woes, games could only curb the hormone induced depression of being sexually deprived, but never resolve it completely. It's mother nature's way of giving your ass a non-stop beating to get out there, act like a fool and prove in a signifcant-but-subtle-enough-so-that-you-don't-look-like-you-have-a-small-dick way that you're better than the other male out there so that you can get girls' attention.

You know, it's a lot simpler in the animal world. I once saw this discovery channel segment where two male turtles wanted to stick their little willy into the same female. Like any testerone-fueled creature, they started duking it out, until the stronger one put the weaker one on its back. Then, while the loser was wiggling upside down, the stronger turtle just walked away with the female, totally ignoring the loser. The loser eventually got on his feet, and walked away, looking as if his dick just imploded.

Would that work in a human world? no fucking way! The girl would start going "how could you BOTH be so immmature? stop fighting!" and then leaves both guys standing there looking stupid as hell, wondering what the hell they need to do to win the girl's affection. So it is no wonder that nowadays, guys are forced to adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards attracting women. Eg. gel your hair, wear verscae clothing, flash a business card that says "Project Engineer" (when in reality all you do at work is serve your boss coffee), and then walk away with a false smile and then HOPE... just HOPE, that the girl thinks you're not "just another guy".

Is there any wonder why humans would prefer video games over the god-awful world of human mating?

It is so unbelievable how psychologically dependent I am with my computer. It's scary really. Several times last night, I couldn't help but worry whether it was more than the power supply, whether I would be deprived of a computer for more than a couple of days. In the morning, I called the computer shop incessantly before it opened, hoping someone would be there early to answer my call and assuage my fears. Fortunately, it turned that it really was just the power supply... so I rushed over and told them that I'd just buy a new one instead of waiting for the warranty replacement.

However, any day without a computer is enlightening in the sense that it reminds me what life was like before the information age... BORING AS HELL. Well, it's not as bad in Taiwan, where there are a lot more conveniently available entertainment options within biking distance. Yetserday, I went to NTU and kicked a soccer around, then I played pickup basketball. Our puny team managed to scrape out a couple of wins against a much more coordinated opposition. It's always a goddamn mystery why the opponent is always the one flashing left and right making passes all over the place, while my team always plays iso. Maybe cuz my very presence fosters selfish play. The only reason why I pass is becuase I don't feel like scoring this possession.

One thing I've noticed however, is that a computer is a spiritual drain. Use it too long, and your mind turns into real mush... you can't think clearly anymore and your body feels like it's rotting from the lack of physical movement.

Yetserday night, when I was watching a rather forgettable warcraft 3 replay, my PC just died on me. It was unlike any other crash I've seen before... it wasn't a reboot or BSOD, nor was it a spontaneous power off... the screen just went black, the power light was still on, the power supply fan was still blowing... but everything just died right there and then. I tried rebooting the PC but as expected, things were much more serious than a simple reboot.... the PC would not even POST, would not even make any kind of beeping.

I strongly suspect the power supply but those motherfuckers at NOVA need a whole goddamn day to investigate. They just line up all their problem PC's in the back and when the store closes that's when they actually start doing the testing. I was planning on doing a lot of CMUSIC work today, had a pepsi at lucnhtime and my brain was ripe for some work... but no fucking PC!!!! Fuck fuck fuck. I considered moving hardwrae around and installing the shitload of audio/midi software I need on my girlfirned's computer, but I realized that by the time I finished hunting down all that software and moving all that hardware, I'd be so dead tired I wouldn't even be in a worknig mood anymore.

I STRONGLY suspect the power supply. It was sizzling hot at the time of failure. Can't say I'm surprised though, a power supply is a capitalist's dream... a rather innocuous unit sitting in the back with mass amounts of public confusion as to what is considered a good power supply (500W? fuck that must be a good one!), and thousands of ways you can cost cut (= more profit) without needing to face the repercussions, since it's usually the poor consumer who has no idea what the problem is with their comptuer.

I once made this site for Morrowind, the "Morrowind Treasury", where I would list all the unique items that I've found so far:

look at what this guy said:

google groups link

I never knew people liked it so much!!! But then again, I did get like zillions of feedback for it. But I abandoned, like anything else, after I lost interest in Morrowind.

I just saw this program on television regarding Mitsibushi's cover-up of a serious defect in their auto parts. This "defect" was a result of cost-cutting and involved a certain part relating to the engine & brake that was improperly manufacturered. I believe that 3 people have already died in an accident directly related to this defect (and only god knows how many unreported cases). Transport Minister Nobuteru Ishihara is calling this incident "so disgusting that I am speechless". Welcome to the world of large publicly owned corporations.

I'd like to take the chance to introduce to my readers the concept of "externality". Much like how a large manfuacturing company prefers to dump their toxic wastes into the river, or how Nike prefers to use child labor to manufacture their shoes... large corporations are all notorious for having a tendency to "externalize" their costs. Why the word "externalize"?, Well, in order to satisfy the analysts' expected quarterly earnings, struggling corporations are often enticed "cut costs". But it is not so much "cost cutting" as it is "cost transferring", that is, instead of the corporation paying for proper disposal of wastes or paying proper wages for labor, they "externalize" the cost onto society or the environment, often in the form of unrecoverable damage. And then, the company writes the expense off as an "externality". They've simply transferred the costs of business to somebody other than themselves. And it's all okay, because even if they get caught, barring a ridiculously hideous penalty through a organized set of public lawsuits, some MBA grad probably calcaulted the the savings of externalization actually exceed the expected government fine.

Does that make you mad? Well, if you're a shareholder of such a externalizing-happy company, it should make you happy that corporations are probably doing these kinds of things because they place a higher importance on your monetary satisfaction than a "negligible" risk to society or the environment. Of course, if you knew about it, you wouldn't APPROVE of it, but you want the numbers, and you certainly have to credit them for delivering the results you seek. But if you live in the community where a large corporation is dumping their wastes, or you're the father of the dead son who lost his life due to improper manufacturing, you'd be pretty shit mad about the whole deal. Too bad there's NOTHING you can do about it eh?

God knows how many externaties society has had to shoulder... god knows how many HIDDEN externalities are running amok in this world, waiting to be discovered by its 1st victim.... and yet ironically is it the very same society that puts such copmanies under pressure to commit these acts.

The monster is not the CEO who makes this decision, becuase the CEO, just like you and me, is just another human being. Imagine you were appointed to be CEO of McDonalds and one day a scientist comes up to you and shows you proof that Big Macs triple the risk of cancer in kids. Are you going to be a good boy and announce the whole thing at a press conference the next day? Then say goodbye to your life. The public is going to sue you, angry mothers are going to want to kill you, your wife is going to leave you, you'll face an endless series of investigations, and your big house and fancy car are going to be auctioned away on ebay.... your life is basically OVER. And you didn't even invent the goddamn Big Mac. Would you still want to be a good boy? Give me a break. I'd shutup, you'd shutup, anyone would shutup and try their best to cover the whole goddamn thing. In fact, only a masochistic moron would come out and tell the world all the dirty little secrets of his company. You expect the public to sympathize? Try getting that angry mother to "understand" how you were only recently appointed, how you never knew about these things. And there are going to be a lot of angry mothers.

Just because you haven't heard about them yet, doesn't mean they don't exist. The world is rife with unsafe products, full of mega-corporations' externalities, just waiting for the next innocent guinea pig to be the victim of discovery. And corporations, for the sake of protecting themslves, for the sake of protecting the intersests of society, cannot say a damn word about it.

I first heard about chaos theory through Jurassic Park I, when that crazy scientist did some simple experiment with a tiny drop of water.

Chaos theory is truly something beautiful because it is an investigation of the underlying forces of the fabric of our universe, and it also places strict limits on the application of Newtonian physics.

Chaos theory I think can be best introduced with the following example:

In a closed room of dimensions, temperature, air pressure, wind flow, surface friction, surface hardness, etc. etc.... all known to the greatest accuracy that modern science can measure, I perform the following 2 experiments:

1. I take the a coin (of which dimensions, material, and all relevant data are known to the best accuracy), place it on the ground, and push it with X newtons of force. How far does it slide?

2. I take the same coin and drop it from a fair height of x metres. Does it land heads or tails?

Both problems involve the same coin, the same room, the same still air, and follow the the same laws of physics. And yet both are fundmentally different in this sense: for the first experiemnt, the better I measure the initial conditions, the better I can predict the actual result. So if I used better tools to measure relevant data such as the coefficient of friction between the coin and the ground, I would get a similar improvement in the accuracy of my prediction of how far the coin is going to slide.

The second experiment however, holds no such guarantee. Due the nature of the result being so sensitive to the intitial conditions, I can keep measuring to an endless degree of accuracy and yet the only thing I can be sure of is unpredictability. In this case, it does not matter how many physics equations you apply to how good of an initial measurement, the final result is always unpredictable. You could be right this time, but double the accuracy and ironically in the next trial your answer becomes wrong. In other words, there seems to be no relation between the accuracy of the initial measurements and the accuracy of the calculated prediction.

Another strange example (which to me is truly intriguing): A planetary system of two bodies is entirely predictable, given enough accurate information of their present state. A planetary system of three bodies, however, is not.

This is what scientists called "Chaos". Newton once believed that if he knew enough about the universe and the mathematical laws that govern it, he would be able to predict everything until the end of time. This is strongly related to the philosphical belief of "determinism"... that everything is already pre-determined, that everything that happens in the next fragment of a nanosecond can ultimately be predicted if we had enough information about the current state and the laws that govern its change.

Chaos theory comes along and shatters that belief. The universe is fundmantally non-deterministic... and that in itself opens up a whole science in itself. Are there patterns in this non-determinism that we can observe all around us? What is the true root of non-determinism? As it stands, scientists have observed that in quantum physics, absolute positions of sub-atomic particles can never pinpointed to any degree of accuracy no matter what the measuring instrument. That is why electron orbitals are expressed stochastically... in terms of probability that an electron is in a certain field, as opposed to the exact location; it is a fundamental limit of science's ability to predict atomic behavior. Perhaps the unpredictability of the atom is the foundation by which the universe itslef is by nature unpredictable.

But what if, somehow, scientists were able to make out order from disorder? It would certainly be a mind-shattering achievement. Complex systems such as the stock market, weather, and whether you're going to eat a hamburger tomorrow or not could be predicted with startling accuracy, and (this is my own little bit) it might even have the potential to disprove free will.

Humans, like a system of 3 planets or the weather, are non-deterministic by nature. Even if you tried to gather every possible fact about a human being, no matter how much you know about him, he is always going to do something you do you not expect. But is that becuase there exists a force in this human being, beyond that of the Physical Realm? That is, unlike a system of 3 planets where the non-determinism can be explained and rationalized through perhaps quantum physics, there somehow exists a Unexplainable Mystical Force within a human being that allows him to circumvent the laws of the universe? It is difficult to imagine. After all, humans do exhibit the predictable response like many other non-chaotic systems in this world. You flash a hand in front of someone's face, he blinks. You kick someone in the behind, he becomes angry. You show porn to a sexually functional male, his dick becomes bigger. There are so many analogies that show that humans are somewhat predictable, depending on the experiment.

Is the unpredictability of a human being a testatment to the existence of free will? I find it hard to believe so. After all, chaotic systems such as the weather are also somewhat unpredictable. Could it be that humans, at least in predictability, are no different from that of chaotic systems? That the root of the unpredictability lies not in the existence of the Mystical Free Will, but in the fact that humans are, like anything else, made of atoms and energies which are subject to the laws of non-determinism as any other Physical Object in this universe?

I was reading this intersting book "Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader" yetserday at Cheng Ping, when I stumbled on this very interesting chapter that was nothing more than an interview with an animal photographer on animals.

Having photographed so many animals in his lifetime, I imagined his perspective on life would be fairly different from those who spend nearly their entire lives within a sterlized, controlled society. And indeed, the answer to his first question intrigued me.

(loosely quoted from memory)

Interviewer: What is love?

Photographer: Love is difficult to define, but is most certainly characterized by madness. Animals in heat act as if they have lost all their senses. You could sneak up on them and kill them and they wouldn't even care. Actually, lots of animals are nearly impossible to shoot unless it is mating season. A lot of ancient tribes forbid hunting during this season.

Interviewer: Talk about jealousy

Photographer: There is a special type of prarie dog [forgot the name] that is quite horrific in the sense that in a group, they will hunt anything. One time, I was following a female leader of such a group. This female had 3 or 4 males sexually dependent on her. One day, the male betrayed her had sex with another female, and that other female gave birth. The female leader did not immediately kill her rival, instead, one by one, she killed every single child that she gave birth to, and then singled out the puniest, weakest one and gave it to her own children was a toy. After all this, she castrated her female rival from the group.


So what the hell does this have to do with anything? While I am certainly wondering what indeed, is the connection to capitalism, I found the above interesting for the simple reason that on certain occassions, on those very special days, you can witness the same behavior in humans. Ever see a guy act like he's lost all his marbles over some female or because he's insanely jealosu? He hasn't really lost his marbles, that's just his animalistic side taking over. We have to acknolwedge the power of the animal within us. It is deep ingrained into our spiritiuality. Perhaps it is there, that capitalism has virtually no spiritual value, that the "black sheep" chapter was somewhat just stuck into the book.

I give you this problem:

A parent, overly concerned with his son's future, pressures him to get into a particular university on the threat that is he fails, he will be disowned by the parent and lose all financial support. The son, fearing for his own well-being, cheats to achieve this goal.

Who is responsible? Who is to blame?

While certain people may contend that the child is entirely to blame, I hope to explain to you my own point of view. It is neither better nor worse than any other reasonable point of view, it's just another way of looking at things. That is very important and I hope you keep that in your mind as you read through this.

I like to think of this universe as nothing more than an infinite sequence of cause and effects. It is a very abstract idea that has its roots in Newtonian physics but encompasses any humanly conceivable object, not just scientific ones. Therefore, abstract and undefinable things such as evil, good, and love are all included in this theory.

Whenever I am analyzing or judging a person, this is the model I always use in my head



Essentially, I have black boxed the individual and conglomerated all the things that happen in this world as "forces". From the day he is born he is subjected, through his five traditional senses, to a smorgasboard of incoming forces from the outside world. These incoming forces have the effect of changing his "shape" (an abstraction for his personality and dispostion) in varying degrees. At the same time, the individual is constantly producing outgoing forces through his actions: talking, pushing, touching. The nature and bias of these actions are naturally a reflection of his current shape at any given time.

The idea that the individual who commits the act is entirely responsible for the act, suggests that any outgoing action can be COMPLETELY INDENPENDENT of his current shape. That is, despite the onslaught of incoming forces shaping him a certain way, he is able to transcend all of this and make a real CHOICE when the time comes. The idea is not without merit. As an example: even though your friends all of sudden become crazy and tell you to kill your parents, it is very unlikely that you will.

However, is this really a proof of choice, proof of the ability to transcend the incoming forces and the very shape of your own existence? I will contend that it is not. The fact that your friends have told you to kill your parents is in reality a very weak incoming force to propel to do so. It will unlikely change your shape as much as the fact that your parents have treated you reasonably well since you were a child. This force is MUCH, MUCH stronger by means of a more meaningful effect multiplied by the long period of time over which it is exerted. Thus, your current shape, which strongly favors protecting your parents, cannot be offset by such an absurd force that tells you to dump all that and kill your parents. But since the obvious "decision" paints you as a good, caring person, you would much more easily go with the idea that it was your CHOICE not to listen to your crazy friends.

Now, I give you the extreme counterexample. Imagine that a parent has beaten their child cruelly through absolutely inhumane means of torture ever since he learned how to walk. The child has been sexually molested, raped, disfigured, and threatened that if he were ever caught contacting the authorities for help, his punishment would be tripled. The child, now an teenager after 15 years of torture, finally discovers where his parent hides the gun and is presented with a chance to kill his molester and end all his pain. Does he shoot? 999 times out of 1000, he will (these are numbers pulled out of a hat, but I'm sure you won't dispute them).

Now, do you hold the teenager entirely responsible for the death of his molesting parent? It would imply that despite all that painful torture he went through, despite having all those horrible memories that he would do anything to forget... he still had the CHOICE of pulling the trigger or not. I hope you have enough sympathetic imagination left in your system to imagine how much pain the teenager must have felt, how much hate has accumulated in his system from day one, how many times he was played out the death of his abusing parent in his mind... and you still expect that the teenager in the heat of the moment, where he standing in front of his abuser and knows that all he has to do is pull the trigger to end all the pain, has the ability to CHOOSE not to because he has been told that killing is wrong, or that there has to be some "other" way to end the abuse?

The fact is, the teenager has no real choice in any way we could imagine it, and you might agree in this case that the teenager is absolved of all the blame, much like when one kills out of self defense. But here's the trap. What if the god awful torture is reduced to nothing more than 15 years of violent spanking, and the grown-up teenager ends up in a similiar position with the gun in hand and the parent in front of him. Does he have MORE choice now, on the virtue that the killing is "less sympathizable"? Can you even quantify the availablity of choice in terms of "I have a 15% choice in this matter, I have a 50% choice in this matter". Last time I stepped out in this world, people really don't really bother to analyze your history when you get caught cheating on a test or selling drugs, if you are above a certain age, you are found 100% responsible for your "100% choice" on those actions. There is no excuse, even though you may explain to them how outside forces have compelled you to do so. "I sold coke to feed the kids", you say, but "The choice was still yours, and you made it, so you are responsible", is the reply you will get 99% of the time.

In that case, if responsibility (and hence choice) is such a black and white affair, in our abuse example above, how much punishment is enough to turn responsibility from black to white? 10 spankings a day? 20? Sexual abuse? Maybe if you added sulfuric acid? Where to you draw the line and say, okay, I think the poor kid had no choice in the matter. How can you even quantify these things?

Responsibility, therefore, must be a gradiation. You are either very involved, somewhat involved, not at all involved. (on the side, according to chaos theory, it is impossible that you are not involved at all with any event in the universe). Now, the question is, since choice cannot be a 0 or 100% affair (as responsibility must be tied in with the ability to choose), can it exist as a gradiation? That is, it is sensible to say something like "It's a 50% choice, 50% outside influence" deal?

On first thought, it seems to make sense. If I asked you to choose to raise either you left or right hand, it's like a "100% choice, 0% outside influence" decision. In the case of the brutally tortured child pulling the trigger on his abuser, that's like a "0.1% choice, 99.9% outside influence". The existence of choice at this point becomes more of a philosphical issue, and relies on whether or not you believe in free will. My philsophical stance: everything is 100% outside influence. Even when I ask you to raise either your left or right hand, a question that seems to be 100% dependent on your free will, if I was able to create a mathetmatically sound model of the universe since the day you were born and simulated the universe up to the point where you made that decision, I would be able to predict whether it is the left or right you raise. It would probably rely on the most unbelievably stupid factors like whether you ate a hamburger on July 7th two years ago, but the nature of your final action is still deterministic.

So now that you've read all of this so far, can you still say that the child who cheated on his test is 100% responsible for his 100% choice? That his overly concerned parents were not even an influencing factor in his final action? Same argument as before, lets modify the influencing factor. What if the parents threatened to kill the child? What if the parents threatened to kill the child and subliminally hinted that cheating is okay? What if the parents threatned to kill the child and told him once that cheating is okay? Told him twice? Three times? Gave him the method to cheat? ORDERED him to cheat or else he'd be killed? When do you say "oh hell's bells, now the parents have crossed that "magical line", so the 100% responsibiliy and 100% choice now is COMPLETELY transferred to the parents. How do you define that "magical line"?

Indeed, if you simply lay all the blame on the person committing the action, it shows a distressing lack of awareness for the forces of Cause and Effect that are playing itself out endlessly through the universe. Sometimes, this means you have to stretch your opinions a little and swallow the absurd. In the abused child case, you should also hold the abuser's parents responsible (if they are still alive) for the killing, because they are the ones who had a helping hand in turning the abuser into the abuser he is today. And the parents of the parents of the parents, for simply giving birth if not for anything else. In fact, if you traverse the cause and effect graph far enough, everyone in the whole wide world is responsible for anything and everything. The difference is in the perceived DEGREE of responsibility in terms of how close your existence is a causal force of a particular event, which can never be exactly 0 but certainly can be very close to 0. In the case of the child cheating on the test, the parents role is so close on that graph, that, from my point of view, it would be absurd to deem them totally innocent. They are not guilty enough in a court of law to be convicted of a felony, but they ARE partly responsible.

What will also turn your noodle is if EVERYONE that year was caught cheating on the same test, you would certainly have a different opinion on whether or not that same child is to blame. Even the parent's guilt would be called into question. In this situation, it's much easier to open your mind to Cause and Effect and say.. wait a minute, not EVERYBODY can be such a dirty little cheater, what could be the real problem? But how does the fact that everybody else cheating can absolve blame? Well, just look at all the pirated software on your computer. Just goes to show how pointing the finger only at the doer is such a fallacy.

Much of what I have written here has it roots in certain flavors of Buddhism. There is no inherent Evil, there is no inherent Good, there is only the living and non-living that are both the puppets of the intricate forces of Cause and Effect. Responsibility is an illusion but in order to control society we must have such a concept as a method of CONTROL. It should not be, as it commonly is, to "label" or "segregate" people into Evil Criminals and Rapists. And my personal philosphical belief is that there is no "mystical force" within us that allows us to transcend the forces that have shaped us into who we are today.

D.Fish, I would suck your dick right now and let you fuck my girlfriend if you wanted to

You have made me believe the impossible.

I hope nobody gets too offended by this, but it's strange that around approximatly the same time, alfatrion and scorpy27 posted stuff that are eeringly simliar. chynadoll18 also seems to have broken up with her boyfriend. Okay, that's not really related to the 1st two, but it's noteworthy news to a dedicated stalker like me.

Correlation? The japanese have a saying "gogatsubyou", literally translated may sickness. The idea is that spring has arrived and, analgulous to the weather, the human mind expects things of good change to arrive. When they don't, depression and perhaps bitterness sets in. It's happened to me before... with the S.A.D. condition.

I know that this post may not be, at first glance, the most interesting one, because I will leave colored writing and profanity at the door this time, but I BEG of you to take 10 minutes out of your time to read this post.

In the latest discussion with Mr. Distrust about Google's decision to IPO, I have taken a book off my bookshelf that I have purchased recently but postponed reading due to the simultaneous purchase of Beckham's autobiography (which was not that great). This book is called: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

The book is great for painting an ACCURATE view of the American publicly traded corporation in terms of a systematic singular entity and the motivations that drive it to do what it does. Nowhere in this book does it claim that a certain individual is responsible for all the evils of the corporate world. Indeed, the book has a certain slant that somewhat reflects mine: people, in any position, are just victims of the system that control them. Stockholders, managers, employees, government are all equally to blame and equally innocent. They are just doing what a human being would do given their position.

What is distressing is that the system we have today, the system of the publicy traded Corporation, is truly a horrible one. While it has undeniably produced an extremely accelerated advancement of technology (of which I enjoy), produced so many extraneous goods that society doesn't even have the capacity to consume them all, and has increased the wealth and traditionally important economic metrics of developed countries to unprecented levels in a short period of time, it does so the expense of human morality. My person tilt is that it does so at the expense of the very things that make humans happy.

You are thinking: well, it's not THAT bad is it? Sure, some bad guys with the power do bad things but most normal corporations are responsible right? And that's perfectly understable. I myself share some affection for certain corporations that have brought me fine products and allowed me to enjoy convenient fast food. It is difficult to picture them as anything else but a good responsible company who makes good products, because in part, that's what they are spending billions of dollars on for you to believe.

But hopefully, your mind is somewhat open at this point, because here is a very crucial fact that most people would not know:

The executives at ANY public traded corporation are in fact LEGALLY BOUND to maximize profits for their shareholders at ALL COSTS. This is a law, and disputes over this have arisen over the course of American History. The earliest one was the Dodge vs. Ford back in 1916. In short, the Dodge brothers invested money in Ford when he began his motor company. After Ford became successful, the Dodge brothers wanted to use their invested money to start their own motor company. Ford however, was a very philanthorpic person in nature, he was quoted as saying "I don't think we should make such awful profits on our cars... business is a service, not a bonanza", and indeed he returned much of the profit back to the consumers through discounts and paid his workers extremely high rates. To those ends, he annulled the dividends paid off by his shares, and the Dodge brothers took him to court for irresponsibly ignoring his legal obligation to produce the maximum profits for shareholders at ALL costs. The court agreed and the Dodge brothers won. Morality: 0, Profiteering: 1. The score only gets worse from this point.

There are so many more examples in the book that illustrate that in a corporation, there is simply NO ROOM for humane or moralistic behavior, UNLESS it somehow coincides with the company making more profit. That is in fact, a LAW that has been enforced in the past as illustrated by Dodge vs. Ford. That means that any kind of philanthropic behavior must either 1. indirectly produce some kind of monetary benefit to the company or 2. executed at the manager's personal expense. If you don't satisfy either one the above, you will be taken to court for your goodwill and held accountable for "irresponsibly" managing shareholder's money. There is nothing "wrong" or "illogical" with that... it's just the nature of the beast.

Another short example: BP (2nd largest petroleum company) has recently discovered a potentially huge oil and gas reserve in the Arctic. However, scientists have concluded that if drilling is done there, it would drive the caribou outisde their natural habitat, disrupting the traditional hunting of the natives who live there. Now, as a BP executive, who is legally bound to maximize profits for your shareholders, do you drill there? By the way, BP has often produced propoganada along the lines "Can business be about more than profits? We think so", and the CEO has even won an United Nations award for environemntal leadership. Despite this, the question to drill or not to drill, is in fact, non-existent. The executive has NO choice but to destroy the life of the natives and commence drilling, because that is what serves the best interests of the company, and thus, its shareholders. If he, out of environmental goodwill decided not to carry up the drilling, he would either be sued or if he is lucky, replaced by a more "responsible" executive by the shareholders. One might wonder, why doesn't he just call a vote to see if shareholders all agree that being envrionmentally repsonsible is the right thing to do? That question is somewhat naive. Shareholders, espeically those have enough money to buy enough shares to gain significnat power, are often large investment firms who themselves are responsible to a different set of shareholders, who themselves might find themselves responsble to another set of shareholders. The system nowadays is so complex that the shareholders who are clamoring for profits are so removed from the essence of the company that they can't even feel or understand what really goes on inside the company they own. But what they do understand, is profits. Once again, the BP executive, despite all the propaganada the company tries to put out that it is "environmentally aware", has no CHOICE but to drill in the Arctic. There is simply no room for ethical behavior in a corporate environment.

None of this is extreme, it is the TRUTH. The shareholder, as evil as they may seem, are not the one's to blame. They are only protecting their investment to the best of their ability. The EVIL, if such a thing exists, lies in the system of the Corporation itself. It is set up, by it's VERY NATURE, to value profit and self-interest above everything else, WITHOUT EXCEPTION. To make claims that a Corporation can voluntarily be socially responsible, in the sense that being socially responsbie is an ethical duty, is actually absurd. Corporations are only socially responsible if they decide that socially responsible is what maximizes their profits. If the choice between maximizing profits and being socially responsible are against each other (as in the BP Arctic drilling case), the corporation must under all circumstances favor maximizing profits.

More examples to come... I need to eat now...

Just FYI:

Kernaghan struck gold on one of his garbage dump forays when, in the Dominican Republic, he found copies of Nike's internal pricing documents in a box that had been left by one of the garbage trucks. The documents contained calculations every bit as chilling as those in Edward Ivey's report. Their purpose was to maximize the amount of profit that could be wrung out of the girls and young women who sew garments for Nike in developing-world sweatshops. Production of a shirt, to take one example, was broken down into twenty-two separate operations: five steps to cut the material, eleven steps to sew the garment, six steps to attach lables, hang tags, and put the shirt in a plastic bag, ready to be shipped. A time was alloted for each task, with units of ten thousandths of a second used for the breakdown. With all the units added together, the calculations demanded that each shirt take a maximum of 6.6 minutes to make - which translates into 8 cents' worth of labor for a shirt Nike sells in the United States for $22.99.

That, my friends, is how you satsify shareholders. You can praise Nike for upholding their duty to give shareholders their deserved ROI, you can villify them for not respecting human life, but one thing's for sure, the executivies did their job very well.

I just received a request to fill a survey from the ISXO (the exchange program which brought me to Taiwan) and of course, I filled it out, out of gratitude. Why am I grateful to the ISXO? Well, the good life am I living today stems from the catalystic day I applied my lazy ass at the ISXO, which was not so lazy that time thanks to Wei's challenge that I would never make it into an exchange program.

As I am one to always establish strange correlations, on hindsight ISXO was my ticket to Good and Frequent Sex. I can never be 100% sure of such things, but I'll say that I'm 99% sure that if I left my sorry old self back in Toronto for the final year (which would have made my parents proud to stay home under their financial protection), I'd be in a shit state today. In an effort to justify my existence without a girlfriend and without sex, combined with the hard-headed attitude that most large corporations hate, who knows what kinds of strange solitary hermit I would've become. Hell, the transformation process already started in the latter years of university after my breakup with Christine, but thankfully the process was somewhat reversible.

Well, it's not just the Good and Frequent Sex that changed my life, although that probably accounts for more than 50% of improvement in Terry's Life Quality Index. There's also the PSYCHOLOGICAL benefit of not living at home. People will always talk about the money you save by living with your parents but it's gonna bite you in the ass every now and then. Having your own Nest is an important stage of life to any Darwinian creature, and in my unpopular but you-know-it's-true theory, the financial savings are insignificant compared to how much goddamn pain you'll be spared of living on your own.

For all the wonderful important things I have obtained here in Taiwan (and to those of you who are thinking of my TV or LCD, you're on the totally wrong track) in this world of untold competition of who's-gonna-get-that-big-house, it would make you happy to know that I have likely set myself up for failure in the near future. With no long-term goals and no legitimate reason to stay in this country, there is mounting pressure on me to pack my bags and head back to my "homeland". Well, to answer any of my friends who are wondering, barring a breakup with Shinobu, I dont plan to ever go back to Canada on a long-term basis, UNLESS that's what my girlfriend wants. Aren't I just the greatest loser? Letting my girlfriend decide where we should live? Unfortunately I am not one to subscribe to illusions of grandeur that I would be emotionally fine without her... I am fully aware of my emotional dependnece on her and she is of me. To be emotionally dependent feels fucking good when it is equally reciprocated, and it feels fucking good x10 when recirpocated every day. Honestly, you cannot tire of it, the same way you cannot tire of eating food, even though you need to eat different foods from time to time to whet your gourmet appetite. Of course, if Shinobu were to disappear from my life, I would be equally heartbroken and most likely would be in a emotionally depressed state until the next girl comes along in my life. But it would be very difficult and I doubt that I have the same strength as the average person to make it to that next girl.

Living in Taiwan, in this almost island-like nest of mine, where I am free to indulge in my own pleasures and freedoms with only the occasionaly 3 hour work session to overcome financial obstacles, I have been somewhat freed of all the ridiculous North American traditional ways of thinking. Everyone's common goal is the pursuit of a Good Life but it is only now, living in an emperically worse environment than before but surrounded with human intimacy and given relatively ample amounts of freedom, that I have been able to trascned the North American view of a Good Life. I do not dream of a big house, I do not dream of a nice car, but I do want constant sex, constant attention, and constant ego massaging, day in and day out. From this perspective I would make a pretty shitty father but hopefully my hormones will reorient themselves when I see my first childborn.

This has been a free-thinking, no backspace/delete blog entry that I have not done in a long time.

No more than a couple of days after I wrote some article about the evils of the stock market using Google as an example, something like this pops up. Now, normally I wouldn't bother writing anything in my blogger about a post like that, but he calls my point "comically absurd", so my testicles have a need to get the fucker back. After all, Mr. Distrust does seem like a very smart person but seems to suffer from being locked in with the typical North American Capitalist Paradigm (I have to stop using that goddamn word)

Really, the use of the word "fart" (negative connotation) alongside all those "unnecessary" anemities says it all. That post pretty much represents the typical shareholder point of view:

"I gave you my fucking money now stop dicking around with it and show me some goddamn return".

Now, can you say that with the typical shareholder disposition set like that, the stock market has NO causal effect on the quality of the workplace? Hahahah, now that's comically absurd. The existence of such writing in such a direction is PROOF that if Google did indeed just sell stock the normal way (without the 2-tier system), there would be suddenly be this massive force to get rid of all those nice things Googlers enjoy at their workplace.

Imagine you work at Google, you enjoy all those anemities at work that make your day to day experience a pleasant one. On top of getting delicious free lunches and free massages, your job is actually interesting, because you acutally have freedom to pursue your own intellectual interests. But now, Google goes public, and you can bet your ass that shareholders will call a vote to get rid of all that "luxurious" stuff you enjoy (because for fuck's sake, that's just dicking around with their money) Because there was no 2-tier system, the employee's obvious call for "more massages! more free food!" will be outvoted by shareholders who DON'T work there, and before long Google just looks like the next high-tech company: a gray, rectangular cubicle space taken out of the next Dilbert comic. Streamlined, downsized, efficiency-maxmized - doesn't that sound like a lovely place to work? Once the more obvious anemities expense is "fixed" by shareholders, you can bet your ass your intellectual freedom will be next. Can you explain how your pet project translates into tangible revenue for this fiscal quarter? No? Sorry, keep your geek impulses to your spare time.

Strangely, even though Google has all these employee luxuries, even though Google gives their workers the intellectual freedom we all desire, the company is making hella profit. The shareholder's typical short-sighted point of view is... well, if you're making that much money now with those unwanted expenses, you'd be making that much more without them! This is so representative of typical North American Capitalist thinking: the only things of Value are things that can be counted. What are the long-term effects of removing these anemities, of depriving brainy engineers and scentists of the intellectual freedom they desire? Will Google be in the same super-healthy state as it is now? Big-time shareholdres have no time to investigate these questions nor do they care, the only thing on the forefront of their mind is maximizing their returns, because that's their raison-etre.

To put things more in perspective in for you: the owners of Google have stated, on paper, that all the anemities they provide their employees is in total nothing more than a rounding error on the financial statements. Maybe that's exaggereated, but I'm sure the nature of the expense is not something to get so worried about, IF your compnay doesn't have skeptical shareholders looking over your shoulder shouting every goddamn day "why the hell are you spending MY money on this? stop dicking around with my money!"

For such a relatively small expense to bring so much happiness and comfort to so many Google employees, in my eyes, is a Beautiful Thing. It warms my heart to see that at least someplace in this world, there exists a company where employees can enjoy a job with intellectual freedom, anemities that make you feel at home, and good salaries. That is, in my view, a great achievement. But try to explain that to shareholders who want you to use every last goddamn penny they invested in you to maximize their ROI, and you get a post like Mr. Distrust's latest entry.

Finally, for all the flak and sarcasm Mr. Disturst dishes out on Google's 2-tier decision, I believe the owners of Google are doing the right thing... they are protecting their own employees and their own company which they created without the help of Wall Street. It may seem at first that the owners are trying to make themselves filthy rich while conveniently avoiding all the responsibility that entails from being a publicly traded company. Or perhaps they really do need some seed capital for some totally massive, top-secret project. But, for what I know, the main reason they are IPO'ing is because the venture capital company which funded them at the beginning is pressuring for it. As the sidebar article in Newsweek stated, it is really a bad decision for Google to go public, becuase Wall Street pressures would hurt them a lot more than not having that extra bundle of money. As a total outsider, I have very limited perspective on why they decided to IPO. I certainly don't agree with it, becaus even with the 2-tier system, everything that is Good and Sacred at Google will be in danger of extinction the moment you have shareholders knocking at your door.

But of course Mr. Distrust is right... there is no point in blaming the stock market for workplace miseries, after all, there is nothing you can DO about the existence of the stock market. So you go to management, but that's like trying to solve a leak by constnatly getting rid of all the incoming water. Management decisions, when channeled back up to the highest tiers, will eventually show a strong influence from shareholders. You can keep bitching to your boss about this and that but most of the time in these huge publicly traded companies, your boss didn't make that decision, someone who doesn't even work at the company did.

Nobody here is at fault... the shareholders have every right to get the most for their money and the employees should have a right to be offered the best workplace the comapny can reasonably afford. The stock market just sets the two against each other. A comfortable workplace costs money (not a lot, but something that does show up as a blip on the financial statements), but it means NOTHING to the shareholders other than another "unnecessary expense". And so, when non-employee shareholders are given the bulk of decision power, the end result are shitty work environments, when that is truly an Unncessary Evil. We have the resources and capital to create wonderful environments for any successful company, but nature of the shareholders dispostion will be a constant and ever-lasting opposing force against this.

First of all, I would like to thank Kobe for giving an outstanding performance in Game 4 WHEN I WATCHED THE GAME. It seems everytime I watch the Lakers play from beginning to end they get their asses kicked, and Kobe turns in a shit performance. But not this time.

Second of all, check out these prices for Staple Center tickets. I knew they were expensive, but HOLY SHIT, a goddamn seat costs 21 grand US? Guess that what happens when rich-ass celebrities drive up the market price with a nearly infinite pocket.

I've been plowing through this month's CMUSIC set with faster than average speed, so I've been left with a bit of spare time on my hands. This afternoon, while Shinobu was out teaching, I went to NTU's library. You know, libraries always bewilder me. When I was younger, I saw them just as a place where there are a lot of books. But now, a library is like a landfill of human thought rendered into textual form.... millions of thoughts and ideas explained in an unique way archived into books. It's truly awe-inspiring. A world of (mostly redundant) knowledge at your fingertips, which you can browse at your leisure.

I picked out a couple of books about the science of music and sound, and also a book about economics. I've been pondering a lot about economics lately, mostly becuase of all the strange things I see in the world today. I started reading the introductory chapter of a very thick economics book called "Introduction to Economic Thinking". I was more interested in developing an economic intuition rather than memorizing a bunch of economic formulas (which I'd forget right away anyways).

10 pages in, I realized that I could not transcend reality. What does that mean exactly? It means that while I was going into the library hoping to come out enlightened about the ways of economics, common sense will tell you that casual reading will produce casual results. And that's what I was doing exactly... casual reading. From my experience, casual reading (especially about traditional discplines such as engineering, economics, etc.) is nothing more than a average way to kill time. You learn very little from such a session other than a few key facts that you can regurgitate if someone asks you within a few days of your reading. Pure facts are worthless. What IS worth something, is the human intuition of such a discipline. To be able to "think like an economist" or "think like an engineer" is extremely valuable. But you can't get that through reading books, you get through years and years of being involved in the field and practicing the trade. Time and immersion are truly the only teachers worth their salt.

In the last year or so I have developed a principle: "You are the product of your own reality". It's quite simple, and it makes perfect sense (of course it does, since I thought of it). Basically, whatever you are GENUINELY good at, and whatever you suck at, can pretty much be explained through your history as a human being. What have you been doing since you were a kid? Where has all your time been spent? Is it any wonder that I was called a "Java King" in 1st year university when I spent all of my lonely high school years writing C programs at home and at work for my dad? I was simply a product of my own reality.

One explanation for this phenomenon is that contrary to popular belief (the mind is flexible and can quickly learn to be good at anything as long as you put enough effort) - the brain has a strong resistance to being programmed, and an even stronger resistance to being RE-programmed. As an example: an economists mind is in a certain state with certain brain cells linked up a certain way... but to get to that kind of state, a lot of "programming" is required... in the amount that cannot be achieved in terms of months or weeks, but YEARS and YEARS of constant exterior environmental influence. To be able to recieve this environmental influence is not something that can be called upon by simple human motivation. All the pieces of the world must be in the right place at the right time, in order to breed you into that certain mold. This is in contrast to the North American belief that "you can acehive anything as long as you try hard enough".

This also probably why it is difficult to convince people to think a certain way, particularly when it involves more abstract things such as love, because there is no scientifical proof or rationale to justify favoring one paradigm over another. You believe that your point of view is correct, and try to convince the other guy of your view, but for some reason there's always that stubborn resistance that prevents the desired assimilation, and a argument ensues. In this case, the brain is exhibiting a resistance to being RE-programmed, which is even stronger than simple programming because of the person's disposition to reject unsolicited advice. Perhaps this is one mechansim by which Mother Nature creates variety in a world where individuals favor homongeny. If everyone accepted everyone else's ideas without a strong amount of resistance and skepticism, then people wouldn't know WHAT to think anymore, everyone's mind would be a massive jumbled mess of "good" ideas. At the end of the day, it should be the time and immersion factor that picks which idea to believe.

I guess certian people (particularly the North Americans) will look at this "product of reality" paradigm as a "loser's way of thinking". That is, it encourages you to give up before even trying. That's not how I look at it. This kind of thinking should encourage you to take more accurate risk assessments before embarking on an ambitious project. If all of a sudden you want to become some hotshot 3d graphic artist working on the next mult-million Pixar project, but you're already 24 years old with a CS degree in Software Engineering, how are you going to compete against that young ambitious dude who went to Sheridan and has already produced killer 15-sec spots on MTV? Either you have to reduce your ambitions, or get prepared for many long years of hard work where no great rewards can be seen.

It sucks, but that's barrier of reality.

It seems every time I go to the bookstore and read the latest trio of Time/Newsweek/Fortune, there is something that gets me mad. Today was an article in Fortune detailing the lawsuit SCO filed against IBM for using UNIX code in their distributions of Linux. It was simply gut-wrenchingly disgusting.

I can't say I fully understood the full details of the lawsuit, but here's what I got out of it: SCO owns Unix, the operating system Linux was derived from, and has discovered that something like 5% of Linux source code actually contains fragments of the original Unix operating system (oh no, what a disaster!)

So, like any capitalist piggy wanting to make money no matter how stupid or unethical the means, SCO demands that any company that uses Linux pay a $699 single processor licensing fee for that 5% of copied code. If you refuse, they would threaten you with a lawsuit.

So, taking from an example in the article, if you were a company that released millions of cell phones based on Linux, which contained 5% Unix and 95% Linux, you would have to pay SCO a huge royalty or the court could potentially order you to recall all those cell phones because of that 5% and force you to change that 5%. (this actually reminds me of people copying other people's source code for university CS assignments and then changing the comments and coding style to fool the TA's)

This has the potential really hurt Linux, as even though the lawsuit is almost comical, companies don't want to take unnecessary risks. Just the fear of a lawsuit would make the company think twice about using Linux in a commercial environment.

As I read further into the article, detailing other elements of this complex lawsuit such as Novell's claim over Unix, the GPL and exactly who has right over what, somehow everything just begins to blend into the Absurd. It is only until you read on the 4th page that things start to make sense. After the lawsuit, SCO's stock price jumped $1.09 to $20.50 in October. High ranking officers and directors got filthy rich. The CEO Darl McBride received a $1 million bonus compensation. When SCO was privately financed 50 million for the lawsuit, their law firm received 20% of it, and one of the beneficiaries was, what a surprise, Kevin McBride, Darl McBride's brother, who is a solo practitioner working on the case.

(all this information is quoted from the Fortune article so if any of it is inaccurate, don't blame me)

It's all about greed & money. Instead of focusing on creating and researching, tech companies are now busy as hell bickering and fighting with each other over this right and that right. It's simply ridiculous. It's painfully obvious that so much in this world is based on "gentleman's agreements"... you don't a need a fucking lawyer to enforce every goddamn point you want to make, as long as your point is reasonable, people will listen and agree with you. But now companies are treating the legal system as a cash cow, and using lawyers as their arsenal to manipulate stock prices and get rich.

Or maybe it's the other way around. The way I see it, no engineer or scientist would ever come up with such ridiculous lawsuits as a way to make money. It's so dirty, so disgusting, I just can't imagine it. What I can imagine however, is a bunch of researchers at a law firm analyzing the state of the tech world and sniffing for potential lawsuits. When they find one, no matter how preposterous it may initially seem, they approach the CEO of the would-be litigator and present it with a marketing twist: "I see your company is struggling, but here's a way I can make you filthy rich again...". The CEO, overly concerned with his company's dwindling stock value, obliges and the zoo warfare begins.

To the law firm, the more retarded bickering that goes on, the fatter their pockets get. Is there any wonder why people say lawyers belong in Hell?

I can't count how many times struggling companies tried to sue Microsoft over the most retarded reasons. Sure, if you stretch it, like stretching a rubber band to the size of fucking Texas, you may have some trace of sensibility... but otherwise for the most part these kinds of lawsuits are so fucking transparent: they're simply a dirty tactic to make lots of money by doing nothing but bicker bicker and bicker. The sad thing is, with the enormous legal costs, Microsoft is more than willing to pay a private settlement, usually in the millions, to shut the fucking company up and get on with their own business. Justice is of course NOT done, because that just sends out a message to every failing wannabe company that "if you can't beat the competition, then sue them". You never hear Microsoft filing retarded lawsuits against small struggling companies over some unbelievable insignificant detail, even though that detail may have the same amount of legal credibility as the SCO lawsuit. It's always the small loser whining and bitching and suing the successful companies. They just want a piece of the pie no matter what, even though they suck at what they do.

The only conclusion is this: corporate lawsuits (especially those in the volatile and uncertain high-tech world) are not about justice, they are about making money.

I don't blame people like McBride for acting the way they do. They are a product of our times... a product of a twisted capitalist economy which poisons the way people think about life and happiness. Funny thing, after I read the article, I saw a copy of the The Little Prince nearby, and I skimmed through it... when the Prince visits the planet with the businessmen, that chapter pretty much summed up the way these lawyers and CEO's think... own this own that make money make money make money own this own that make money make money stock price stock price make money make money...

Disgusting.

There are 2 dreams that I see over and over again... I've seen them so often now that I sort of want to get a dream psychologist to give me a cheap 2 cent analysis. Here they are:

1. I'm back with my ex-girlfriend Christine, except I'm not entirely sure we're together. The implication is there, I have her number on my cell phone, except, it seems to have been months if not years since we last spoke to each other. Shinobu doesn't even exist or appear in this dream. The core feeling is UNCERTAINTY. It's like being in a relationship with someone but never being able to see them, and thus you're not even sure that you're together anymore. Weird. When I wake up next to Shinobu, a wave of relief washes over me as I'm back to our fairly certain and stable relationship.


2. For some reason, I am in danger of not being able to graduate from univeristy. This one is really strange, because I've already graduated, yet I've only seen this dream post-graduation. Sometimes it's because I'm going to flunk an exam, sometimes it's because I totally forgot that I took a goddamn course, and sometimes it's because Earl Haig calls me up and tells me I forgot to take one OAC course so I have to drop university and go back to high school for one whole year to make up for that course. It's so weird and illogical but everytime I'm convicned what's happening is real and thus the core feeling is DREAD and DESPAIR. When I wake up, a wave of relief washes over me as I realize that I'm here in my own place in Taiwan and thus I must have already graduated.

I got this strange fact from www.replayers.com... a great site for warcraft 3 replays:

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Almost 1,2 billion people are underfed - the same number of people that are overweight to the point of obesity.

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Which begs the question: is starvation a Necessary Evil? In a utopian world, nobody should have to face the intense physical pain of starvation (unless they were so genetically incompetent that an equivalent creature in a natural environment would have died off anyways). Nobody should be eating more to the point of being obese. If all that "wasted" food (wasted in the sense that feeding to the point of obesity is viewed as completely unnecessary) could somehow be convenient distributed at light speed to those who need food the most, it would be a wonderful accomplishment. Instead, too much food gets stuffed into a select few human beings when others need it to avoid the intense physical pain of starvation, it's such a goddamn pity.

I guess I have no right to say anything about this because i haven't donated a single shred of food to Africans or a single penny to Unicef. The biggest problem is that I'm too lazy to go OUT of my way to contribute anything. You can bet if I had unfinsiehd food and it was as simple as pushing a button to whisk it off to Africa, then I would push it everytime. I'm sure just about anybody would. So it would really just be a matter of technology solving world starvation through negating the human condition of laziness. Lord knows that with the food production techniques at are disposal, it's not a matter of whether or not we can produce enough sustenance day to day, but whether or not the distribution can be optimally balanced with respect to specific critiera such as wealth (rich people should get better food) and need (but poor people should never be totally deprived of anything to the point where they are starving). It's just a problem of coming up with such technology to make the world a more ideal place.

Or perhaps I'm looking at this the worng way, that starvation is not only a Necessary Evil (after all it exists in nature), but also a good thing because it kills of useless people. I guess I don't buy that, cuz of the way the modern world works. A lot of genetically inferior beings are born into a rich family and eat too much when Darwinian Natural Selection would have killed them off through various means such as starvation because they would be unable to compete for food. Through inheritance, property and ownership, we have already bypassed the original intent of Natural Selection.

Here are some exceprts (yes I'm that crazy to type it all out for you) from an article in the latest Newsweek detailing the IPO of Google

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Brin [co-founder of Google] says "A management team distracted by a series of short term tragets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half an hour". Google won't fall for that, they insist. There will be no attempt to massage quarterly results to please Wall Street.

Maintaing a quirky, employee-centric culture Brin & Page knew that doubters predicted that going public would be the end of Google's employee amenities like free lunches cooked by Jerry Garcia's former chef and rubdowns on call. "But when you look at the financials, that costs nothing" said Brin recently. "It's less than a roudning error"

[below are excerpts from a Allan Sloan who writes against the IPO in a sideline article]

"...going public sets the snake of greed loose in Corporate Eden. They'll find themselves having to pay at least some attention to Wall Street. Which is too bad... Google doesn't really have to to this. Normally, a company sells stock to the public because it really needs the money (as they say 'go public or go broke'.) Not so at Google, which is flush."

"Google could have done what many new public companies do to let employees buy & sell stock: set up a private market for its shares based on appraised value, rather than subjecting itself to the vagaries of Wall Street"

"Having public stock will affect employees, and hence, affect the company. Once the stock starts trading, Google employees, in the proud Silicon Valley tradition, will be using the latest price to calculate their up-to-the-minute worth. That won't inspire long-term thinking. Let the stock drop and stay down for awhile, and Googlers will turn from mellowing to bellowing. It's the human condition"

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Why are these tidbits interesting? Because it's is a good suggestion on how EVIL the stock market is. People see the stock market as a place to make money if you make good educated guesses. That's not how I see it. I see it as the root of a lot of employee MISERY at the workplace. And there's a strong risk it might destroy all that is Good and Fun (tm) at Google when it IPO's.

Think I'm crazy? Tell that to IBM management, who decided to BLOCK ALL THE WINDOWS with cabinets because they felt that people were wasting time staring at the view outside. This is a classic anecdote I tell all my friends, because it comes straight from my dad himself, and I confirmed it with him 10 times to make sure it wasn't some kind of exaggerated fact.

Do you think that the person who made this decision (about the windows) is a looney? I don't think a looney would have gotten to a position of power to make that kind of decision in the 1st place. No, this decision was probably strongly influenced by the pressures of IBM's shareholders, who's #1 concern is: make the quarterly results WORK. To hell with employee depression, to hell with anemities, to hell with anything that seems like "wasting money or time". Just make those goddamn quarterly results work. Numbers numbers numbers. Statements statements statements.

It is not easy to envision exactly the exact step-by-step correlation between shareholder pressure and the degradation of the workplace environment, because it's a system with a lot of interconnections and complexities. However, needless to say, if there are bunch of people who DON'T work at the company but are EXCLUSIVELY concerned about financial results, you can bet your ass that it's the employees who are going to suffer, badly. You have a great off-shoot idea and want to implement it on company time? Sorry, shareholders say no time for geeky whimsical impulses. You want free drinks and lunches? Sorry, shareholders say it would cut into profit margins and employees would waste time socalizing while drinking.

It's a Zoo really. A Good Life consits more of making quarterly earnings and a 5% gain on stock price the following day. If a workplace is rendered into a Miserable Place by shareholder pressure, that is indeed a great loss for the World, because all the people who work there will suffer. Is this really a Necessary Evil? Is there some kind of impossiblity in the fabric of corporate reality that prevents every company in the world from sharing the same employee-centric ideals as Google?

I wonder...

What a miracle! Today I went with Shinobu to the NTU soccer field and we had a kickabout. Right when we were about to leave, this eccentric mix of philipinos + malaysians playing on a clay surface near us invited me to join their game. There was a black dude too on our team...

Anyways I have not played team soccer in like what... 15 years? So it took some adjusting. I actually started off pretty well, playing in a offensive midfielder/striker position on the right wing. Got a few touches, tried to create plays with the black dude but mostly it was just a lot of running around and hoping a good pass would come my way. On one great play, I actually scored off a rebound, but the goal was disallowed because it was "above the knees". WTF. Okay, I can undertsand why they have that rule, since the pitch is so small people could just rocket the ball from anywhere, but that was a CLEAN OPEN NET SHOT. I was running up the right wing when the black dude hit a nice shot, it bounced off the keeper and landed right next to me, I just put the ball back in at moderate height... and it was fucking disallowed... FUUUUUUCK.

Anyways everything just went downhill from there. I started getting so tired (and thirsty), and as the sun went down I had a hard time discerning who was who. I retreated from a forward position to a fullback. Everyone dressed as they pleased so on a small pitch with 14 players it's kind hard to tell who's on your team and who's not. Still, it was obvious I don't play soccer very frequently, because everytime I got the ball I either gave it away or just kicked it out of bounds... I started panicking and lost confidence. Our team still won, and I made a couple of good defensive stops but for the most part I looked totally lost and confused. Attackers were deking me out at will and I even let a good pass slide right past me and out of bounds.

I have to admit thought playing soccer is so much FUN! I guess it's just part of the excitemnt of being on a team, of being able to show your stuff when the ball comes your way... too bad I had nothing really to show except for some fresh legs and young energy when I came on... but hopefully if I go back there enough times and practice more fundamentals (gotta work on that first touch, my footwork is just sooooo out of place), things will change.

Upper class Fashion/Cosmetics:

Add the names of the major metropolitan cities in small font below your classy foreign name:
Example:

Damari Vivace
New York Paris London Tokyo Amsterdam

(doesn't matter if you have nothing to do with those cities, just put them down and you sound big and important)


Books:
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"
"#1 New York Times Bestseller"

Is it really possible that 10 books are all #1 at the same time? Don't matter, just say you're #1, it has an impact on sheep.


Orange Juice:

Put the keyword "100% Orange Juice" in a bright attractive logo on your box, even though it's 99.9% artificial flavoring and 0.1% actual orange juice.

Taken from the article "The Great Mall of China", Time Asia May 3 2004, p.38

(this article was about a Mr. Jerde, mall designer famous for the Shiodome, Namba Parks, and many other unique shopping malls worldwide)

--------------------------------------
"He is satsifying a craving for originality, which is the one product that global capitalism seems wholly at a loss to deliver"

"China's retail development has been dominated by Thai, Taiwanese & offshore Chinese firms more interested in making a quick profit by duplicating what's already proven a safe investment elsewhere"

"Jerde's own approach is more subtle and oddly, less capitalistic. When he talks about his work, he rarely mentions developers, retailing or shops. Instead, he talks capiously of the common man. 'If you take care of the people' he preaches, 'everything else follows'"

----------------------------

How i wish more people in this world were like Jerde. How I wish there were less people like the Taiwanese/Chinese people who care only about quick profits and not the inner beauty & art of their trade. Even though I've said it before, I'll say it again, global capitalism, for all its merits, has the nasty side effect of destroying art, originality, and beauty in favor of sterile efficient rectangular entities which do everything but FAIL miserably in terms of satisfying the aesthetic and spiritual needs of human beings.

The first quote about global capitalism truly moved me. In all honesty my negative perception towards globalism and capitalism arose not from a single source or person but through natural osmosis over time. When I read articles that praise streamlining, homogenizing, sterilizing all for the sake of shareholder satisfcation and a ticker value on the stock exchange, something in me felt anger and sadness at the same time. People are caught up in a cyclic whirlwind of absurdity they do not even know what they are doing anymore, other than focusing on the $$$ for the next short period of time. It is justified simply by the fact that "everyone else does it", which is hardly a convincing justifcation considering that's what a Nazi citizen living in WW2 Germany would have said about slaughtering Jews.

The Discontents of Global Capitliasm manfiest themselves in many ways but it takes a certain level of awareness to see it. The existence of the Dilbert syndicated comic says it all, really. Consumer deception, slick dishonest practices, junk mail, Charlie's Angels 2, these are all waste products of capitalist-oriented society. It makes perfect sense really. What else do you expect from an economic system that rewards dishonest, unethical people? If you lie to shareholders about your earnings you can keep that 9 million dollar mansion as long as you think long enough of a good cover-up scheme. If you tell the truth about your earnings I hope you have fun explaining to your wife and kids why they're going to lose everything.

There was an article in Newsweek or some similar magazine recently about a leaked internal memo from a Shell employee stating that he could not bring himself to continue lying to shareholders as before. Is this really necessary? To put people into such a position that their own well being and financial security are dependent on them to LIE? That's the stock market for you folks. Just abandon common sense and do whatever the other guy is doing to make money.


Do you really think that the world would fail to operate, that people would go starving, that people who get murdered on the streets left and right if everybody just slowed things down, worked 25 hours a week instead of 40? The truth is that the world operated just fine on a more sensible scheme a long time ago. The one we have now is absurd. It is overworking and overstressing people even though it's not necessary.

By the way, that "FronPage" book I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there used to be two copies at ChengPing but today I only saw one. Is it really possible that such a disgusting piece of filth was actually bought by a human being? There is no justice in this world.

Saw this movie today at Warner Bros Village... FINALLY, I got the into the big cinemas (on the 3rd floor, theatres 1-10). This is fucked up, but the only way to make sure to get into a big theatre is to use that online booking system at www.warnervillage.com.tw, check each time individually and make sure the theatre has 6-10-6 columns (smaller ones are 4-9-4 or 6-8-6). I guess if they told everyone flat out that you'd be watching the movie at a smaller theatre (but paying the exact same ticket price), there'd be a lot of complaints and the smaller theatres would remain very empty.

Anyhow, the movie was very good. The best thing about Kill Bill aside from it's flamboyant panache and unique style is the fact that it's fairly unpredictable. There are very few "sigh, that shit again" moments... everything feels fresh and new. Like when Thurman goes after the dude who lives in a trailer, I would never have expected that a loser like that would be able to take her down so easily. But it happened and that's refreshing. Also didn't expect so much quiet dialogue with Bill, but those were very good moments in the film. If there's one scene I didn't like it was the buried alive part. I had nightmares as a kid when I saw something simliar in the Vanishing (with Kiefer Sutherland). The idea is just horrible. Worse than the Passion, I reckon.

Recently, life's been going in a very predictable pattern. 2 hours of work/day, porn, sex, food, warcraft, 7-11 midnight snack, sleep. The only thing to break the daily monotony is the fact that I teach english on Wednesdays and Fridays (and the Wedensday class isn't very pleasant, but I usually feel euphoric after the 90 minutes is up). Speaking of Warcraft, I can't believe I'm addicted to this game again. Yesterday night I had a couple of skirmishes with the computer wanting to try out the Troll Witch Doctor, lost twice in a row and my testicles couldn't stop protesting... so I forgoed sleep at 5am in the morning and duked it out 3 or 4 more times before I was satsifed with the situation. Kinda sad isn't it? I can't stand losing, even to a stupid AI. I guess that's why I'm too cheap and too afraid to go on b.net and play with actual people... I hate that gut-wrenching feeling after a loss, especially when it only helps to improve a video gaming skill which is not very transferable to more important things in life.

If there's one thing I would like to do in the immediate future, it's to join some kind of really shitty "just for fun" soccer team. I actually bought a soccer ball the last week or so and started kicking it around the NTU soccer field a couple of times. It really feels good kicking a ball around, there's just something about that makes it feel really pleasant... maybe it's because I was actually in a soccer team at Toronto French School when I was a kid. I remember I played in a fullback position... I was talented at anticipating the attacker's next move and dispossessing the ball.

Just some random thigns about soccer. It's fucking HARD to kick a ball high. I think most people have that problem when starting out... you try to whack the ball with your foot as hard as possible but most of the time is just skims the ground. It's unbelievable how real players can be running in one direction so hard and then cross the ball perpendicuarly that high. I remember the one time I actually had soccer practice as a young adult was with Alex Tomic and Matt at the Rippleton soccer field. That's the first time I ever learned the basics on how to put curl on the ball.... man I wish I had some friends around here that would enjoy kicking the ball around for fun.. also, headers HURT! The ball is a lot harder than I remembered and just practicing headers sends shocks down the nerves around your skull. It's not a lot of fun.

Okay, that's it for this banal update.