Why is my site more popular on Mondays?
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Trending on Mondays
Category: ranting
Random thoughts, frustrations, ideas and opinions. Quality not guaranteed, consume only under adult supervision
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Tracking things for no good reason
Could someone explain to me the use of documenting one’s parents ethnic and language groups on a child’s birth certificate is? What possible use can that information be other than for discrimination — either denying something or granting something on the basis of one’s or one’s parent’s ethnic or linguistic group? The only thing I can think is that it could be used for statistics, but that could just as easily come from the census. I think this information is a hold over from when it was used for discrimination, and they just have not removed it, because why would they unless someone forced them to?
The Guardian has a great article [theguardian.com] by Ian Stewart about the mathematical basis (or lack thereof) of the derivatives market explosion which lead to the financial meltdown when the sub-prime mortgage market collapsed.
As with most things that eventually come crashing down spectacularly we should have seen it coming… between the hubris:
[the equation] allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
Ian Stewart, The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash, from The Guardian
and the eye watering numbers:
[the equation] underpinned massive economic growth. By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world’s manufacturing industries over the last century.
All that because of the abuse of mathematics by people who don’t understand math. When people who do understand (scientists) math abuse it you end up with nuclear WMDs. When people who don’t understand it (traders) abuse it you end up with financial WMDs.
To quote:
[M]arket traders copy other market traders. Virtually every financial crisis in the last century has been pushed over the edge by the herd instinct. It makes everything go belly-up at the same time. If engineers took that attitude, and one bridge in the world fell down, so would all the others.
Monkey see; monkey do. My favorite quote in the article has nothing to do with finance or math:
In ancient times, all known swans were white and “black swan” was widely used in the same way we now refer to a flying pig. But in 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh found masses of black swans on what became known as the Swan River in Australia. So the phrase now refers to an assumption that appears to be grounded in fact, but might at any moment turn out to be wildly mistaken.
That’s a thing I didn’t know.
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Singapore, Malaysia… Same-same!
Lonely Planet used one of my photos! Woot! I’ve always loved the photography style in the Lonely Planet books; it’s the type of photos I want to take when I travel.
There is, however, one funny thing about the photo they used. The article is the World’s best festivals in February [lonelyplant.com] is talking about the annual Thaipusam festival at Batu Caves in Malaysia and uses this photo of mine [flickr.com] but that photo was taken in Singapore. Oops.
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Paying the politicians
Singapore is currently “debating” how much to pay its elected leaders. Singapore public servants are well paid by most any standard. According to the papers here the Prime Minister made SG$3,072,200 in 2010 (making him the highest paid politician in the world according to this article [money.ca.msn.com]). Three million dollars. But they are reducing that down to SG$2,200,000 this year. It recently took four pages of the paper to explain how they arrived at these numbers — base salary, annual variable component, 13th month bonus, individual bonus and national bonus… It’s all very complex stuff [salary.sg], just to justify overpaying already rich public servants; you know people who work for the voters, the vast majority of which do not make so much. In fact the average household income for Singaporeans in 2010 was SG$96,000 (according to a Singapore Statistics Department report here [singstat.gov.sg]). Then again, as many Singaporeans know its’ not a country its’ a corporation and the PM is the CEO. CEO’s every where are making astronomical salaries, on the BBC they other day I heard that the average CEO salary was 147 times that of their average employee. By that score Singapore Inc is not too bad at less than 23 times.
Anyway, there is lots of debate and propaganda about Singaporean politicians salary on the web. But the debate gave me an idea. Since politicians are elected and they work for the voters shouldn’t their salary be pegged to the average income of their constituents? I’d like to see politicians paid this way; if they manage to increase the income of their constituents then their salary would go up, if it goes down on their watch then they suffer equally. You want to make astronomical amounts of money so you can swim in it like Uncle Scrooge then work in the private (banking) sector. Politics is supposed to be about improving the public good and service. It should not be a career choice based on salary, I don’t know how to you can take the power trip aspect out of it but I think we should take the greed aspect out. Maybe you’d still have to be rich to run for office but at least it would not be a direct path to getting richer. Besides the perks make up for a low take home salary.