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Earth Hour. One hour out of 24, one day out of 365. Lights out! Fans on, stoves on, air conditioners on, trains running, buses running, factories running, planes flying, ships chugging on crude oil, power plants still burning dirty coal, but lights out. The man who started this movement called it just "symbolic". Problem is, it's the wrong symbol.
Not only does it send the message out that putting out lights somehow helps the earth, it also eases some guilt out of our collective ecological consciousness. It somehow sends out the message that by just putting ourselves in darkness, we are somehow, symbolically, at the very least, reflecting upon how life would be if we didn't have to burn any energy at all. All this, while a lot of people lit candles to show their ubiquitous support of anything these days, ostensibly however, leaving a bigger carbon deposit into the atmosphere from burning wax!
The message going out has more to do with becoming unproductive than becoming efficient. Cutting off power to devices doesn't stop thermal power plants, which are the majority in the world today, from burning fuel. Lights are a very small percentage of our power consumption anyway, and indeed a very, very small percentage of our energy consumption. What we actually achieved is a whole bunch of people in the world were less productive for an hour than they would normally be.
Why do we love the symbols more than making actual lifestyle changes? For example - one acre of land can support twenty vegetarians but only one and a half meat eating humans. Bottomline, being vegetarian is enormously beneficial to the planet - by a factor of 5 at the very least, over being non-vegetarian. Why aren't we giving up meat eating for the right reasons? Because there is no convenience factor there! There is no lazy gesture that we can sign on to, like the new fancy hogwash of buying carbon credits. How it makes a difference to the atmosphere if money exchanges hands is mind boggling!
If we want a symbolic ritual, we could give up meat for a week. Call it Earth Week. No meat. God, that ought to send some businesses scrambling for cover! Imagine the animals that won't have to be killed, the meat that won't have to be refrigerated, or transported. Oh, wait a minute! What about the animals having to be fed until the feast the week after? See? If it isn't long term, it isn't going to work at all.
Let's look at this from a very Indian perspective. Where I live, we've had a regular two hour power outage for over two years, so we're already way, way ahead of all the clowns out there celebrating this stupid Earth Day. If I took the symbol seriously, I'd say I wouldn't have to participate in this Earth Day for another two generations and I'd still have less guilt! So, let's leave the symbolism aside and consider what the real messages going out are.
This Earth Day was first thought about and started in Australia - today the single largest exporter of coal to the single largest consumer, China. In other words, the one country that is going to feed the energy hungry beast called China, with the most polluting of all fuels, is the one that came up with this retarded idea of an Earth Day! And why the heck are we celebrating this, when we are already much more environmentally friendly with hours of power outage all over the country? Shouldn't we emulate perhaps Nepal, which has 16 hours of power outage a day? What kind of environmentally conservative mindset wants to emulate countries that have reliable (read overproduced) power supplies?
The USA and China have the two biggest carbon footprints in the world. India is languishing way behind in that department, and for once, we can be thankful. But there are fashionable idiots all over the world who are busy sending out wrong messages. And our idiots are grabbing them and really thinking it makes a bloody difference! We apparently saved 916 megawatts of power during the Earth Hour according to some estimate. With just lights, if we managed so much of a saving, how come this will never reflect in any power production budget? It won't because we didn't produce any less, we just consumed less! If we actually produced less, the environmental ministry simply has to cut a deal with the energy ministry! India would shut everything down and be the most environmentally friendly.... yuk, India would be the "most green" country in the world!
If this doesn't make sense, think about this - our power plants, mostly coal fired thermal units cannot run below capacity just because we anticipate all our fashionable clowns switching off their lights for an hour. Hydroelectric plants never run below capacity, for there is nothing to save except stored water, in some cases. Lights are less than 15% of our power consumption, remember? So, we continue to pump out as much electricity through the generators at the thermal power plants, and we'll be damned if some idiot downstream switches off his lights or not! Now, let's look at the numbers this symbol actually stands for - 1 hour out of 24 is 4.16% of a day's consumption. Assuming we had ALL lights off during this period across the country, that is, that would be 15% of 4.16% of a day's consumption - or 0.625% in a day. Divided over the number of hours in a year, that was a royal saving of 0.0000171% of our annual production. When was the last time you were happy saving 0.0000171% of anything? No wonder no power plant around the world takes this Earth Day with even a symbolic reduction in production.
Saving the environment must be the same as saving money - not until we figure out how to do this, do we actually have any chance of building a lasting interest in saving anything. Coal and oil are doing very well, because they are still very cheap, considering how much it costs for us to mine as a percentage of how much money we can make from the mining. Until solar power and wind power and all the other sources of energy come down in cost, we don't have any chance of realistically bringing about a change in usage habits.
For some reason, it was fashionable for the White Man to destroy entire continents in his search for a comfortable life. It was okay for him to dig out all the world's resources and burn as he wished. Now, all of a sudden, he wants to sell us new technologies since he realizes he ultimately doesn't control too much of the world's oil. Up came this great suggestion from none other than the foxes in the USA - let's bring all the world's forests under a global management system. Well sorry White Massa! In fact, fuck you. That didn't work out very well, so now we have this widespread media onslaught that the environment is really important and that we cannot poke holes in the ozone layer, but only since the White Man is the one who is first going to get skin cancer by the dozen!
Sadly for Whitey, the rest of the world is pretty savvy when it comes to alternative technologies - there is no breakthrough infinite energy source for whitey or anybody to control. And a very brown Arab community still has plenty of oil, and the Venezuelans aren't likely to hand over their big oil resources to the Yanks or the Brits either. Nor are the Kazakhs or the Iranians. And many OPEC countries are considering switching from the US Dollar to the Euro to peg their oil and gas on! Not the British Pound! With so many countries in the EU, we don't have to worry about any controlling interest in the currency itself. In other words, Whitey's control of oil has eroded bloody fast. So he's looking for something new to control, but we must first be made to fear that shit that looms in the unknown future. Disaster is easy to subscribe to. Well guess what? If we had no power and no oil, we in India will simply ride our bullock carts and ride out the disaster. Whitey cannot.
But Whitey can scare the shit out of us. Because we have idiots who believe everything Whitey tells us. Their freaking press looks so classy, they can't possibly lie, can they? Yes, they can. And we're falling like ninepins for the bullshit they spin out. Their lies are all geared towards feeding some industry or the other. They've even invented diseases and told the whole world to get vaccinations for diseases that don't even exist! Look at our poultry industry! Crushed by thousands of vested interests. Luckily we have realized that broiler chicken is no good and are back to raising free range chicken. Same with genetically modified foods and brand new diseases like ADD! How come the new generation suddenly has a disease, a disorder, that none of our ancestors had, well up into this century, this generation of parents!? Whitey lies.
So fuck Whitey when he tells us to use resources carefully. All of a sudden, those are global resources, huh? Every culture uses whatever it can afford to use. We don't have to sacrifice anything for anybody. We are already very judicious with our decisions and look at how well our regulated banking system did not flinch with this global crisis Whitey had to endure with crashing, burning and pain! We may be terrible in many ways, but we know how to take care of our shit when we really have to. We don't need to add to the pain we already have without enough electric power. We have done enough. To hell with Whitey. Fuck Earth Hour.
BSK.
Showing posts with label crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crisis. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Happy New Year!
Once upon a time there was a New Year. Now we bloody have it once a year. So, what's new?
Resolutions, hope, joy, cheer, drunken delirium, relief, and this time, by golly - anger! Anger about how lousy 2008 was! Well, well... are we becoming honest about things like this? Now come on, it is just another date on the calendar, surely. But there is an energy of consciousness, of our eagerness to forget all that is bad, and somehow sum it into that year called 2008.
Everything went wrong for sure, but it isn't as if all the seeds that caused the misery of the year gone by were sown in the same year. It isn't as if Wall Street crashed because of some numerological error. It was a gargantuan error of numbers that a lot of people bought into. But for sheer fear of feeling even smaller than we should feel, we haven't called ourselves really stupid, just yet. The worst part is - It isn't as if the ringing in of the New Year will make us, the human collective, smarter overnight.
But... let's keep hope, for when we're broke, that is all we have. But then, that is the popular belief being propagated with the hope, once again, of keeping us all shackled to our stupidity. The smart ones have moved on, and they never really bought into the mockery of trends. The trend of the IT industry booming, the trend of the stock markets soaring, and the trend of making money without creating any real value to anyone that the Americans thought would last forever!
The smart ones know to stay under the radar, collecting their chips quietly and efficiently, and simply keeping note of how much stupidity can infest the rest. They are not going to come out and offer advice on how to avoid this the next time. This is natural selection, and there is nothing to suggest 2009 will be an unnatural selection that will pardon stupidity.
Don't believe the myth of the connected world. It isn't a myth anymore. It is a horrible reality that has plenty of promise but the seduction is greater than the reward. I see no reason for our farmers suffering low costs of their produce just because people in some other country started eating less beef. There is no mystery waiting to be unlocked in an inextricably connected world, where a forest fire in California can affect your bank's lending rate to build your house in Chennai.
See, there is something romantic about things like "One World", "The Human Collective" and so on, but we love to hear things like that. It makes us feel coccooned in our lazy existence, and relatively safe. That is the feeling we cannot keep when we have incidents like the Mumbai massacre. That annoys us more than the act of being attacked. That is why we slip into comfort zone with the passage of time. The truly aware amongst us would never let the anger drop, until revenge is complete.
We're in competition, all the time. Not with a lousy non-state country like Pakistan, but with the rest of the developed world. Truth is, we'd be lousy without competition from our own kind, and intense competition from other countries. If there is any practical value in having a connected world, it is for the people who need a bigger market to sell their stuff to. It is all about selling. It is all about being able to buy more by selling more.
We can either evolve beyond this idea completely, and support a vision for the whole of humanity to live together in harmony, but that is not in our nature! It is in our nature to prove who is bigger, better, faster, richer! That is why we see a connected world as an opportunity, no matter what price we pay.
We haven't yet paid the full price for our actions of the past few years. Lack of imagination is a criminal shortcoming. Lack of intellect is a doomsday scenario. Lack of knowledge and insight shall not be pardoned. People who ran towards "careers" that seemed like guaranteeing great lives are standing shortchanged and a little mystified.
The noose has been around our necks for a long time, and some of us weren't smart enough to escape when it was still loose. Now, it is tightening and tightening rapidly. It isn't as if some promises were broken! The promise was never there, and many were too stupid to see it. They loved the illusion and the ringing in of the New Year as the harbinger of something new, is the newest of them all. Happy New Year!
Resolutions, hope, joy, cheer, drunken delirium, relief, and this time, by golly - anger! Anger about how lousy 2008 was! Well, well... are we becoming honest about things like this? Now come on, it is just another date on the calendar, surely. But there is an energy of consciousness, of our eagerness to forget all that is bad, and somehow sum it into that year called 2008.
Everything went wrong for sure, but it isn't as if all the seeds that caused the misery of the year gone by were sown in the same year. It isn't as if Wall Street crashed because of some numerological error. It was a gargantuan error of numbers that a lot of people bought into. But for sheer fear of feeling even smaller than we should feel, we haven't called ourselves really stupid, just yet. The worst part is - It isn't as if the ringing in of the New Year will make us, the human collective, smarter overnight.
But... let's keep hope, for when we're broke, that is all we have. But then, that is the popular belief being propagated with the hope, once again, of keeping us all shackled to our stupidity. The smart ones have moved on, and they never really bought into the mockery of trends. The trend of the IT industry booming, the trend of the stock markets soaring, and the trend of making money without creating any real value to anyone that the Americans thought would last forever!
The smart ones know to stay under the radar, collecting their chips quietly and efficiently, and simply keeping note of how much stupidity can infest the rest. They are not going to come out and offer advice on how to avoid this the next time. This is natural selection, and there is nothing to suggest 2009 will be an unnatural selection that will pardon stupidity.
Don't believe the myth of the connected world. It isn't a myth anymore. It is a horrible reality that has plenty of promise but the seduction is greater than the reward. I see no reason for our farmers suffering low costs of their produce just because people in some other country started eating less beef. There is no mystery waiting to be unlocked in an inextricably connected world, where a forest fire in California can affect your bank's lending rate to build your house in Chennai.
See, there is something romantic about things like "One World", "The Human Collective" and so on, but we love to hear things like that. It makes us feel coccooned in our lazy existence, and relatively safe. That is the feeling we cannot keep when we have incidents like the Mumbai massacre. That annoys us more than the act of being attacked. That is why we slip into comfort zone with the passage of time. The truly aware amongst us would never let the anger drop, until revenge is complete.
We're in competition, all the time. Not with a lousy non-state country like Pakistan, but with the rest of the developed world. Truth is, we'd be lousy without competition from our own kind, and intense competition from other countries. If there is any practical value in having a connected world, it is for the people who need a bigger market to sell their stuff to. It is all about selling. It is all about being able to buy more by selling more.
We can either evolve beyond this idea completely, and support a vision for the whole of humanity to live together in harmony, but that is not in our nature! It is in our nature to prove who is bigger, better, faster, richer! That is why we see a connected world as an opportunity, no matter what price we pay.
We haven't yet paid the full price for our actions of the past few years. Lack of imagination is a criminal shortcoming. Lack of intellect is a doomsday scenario. Lack of knowledge and insight shall not be pardoned. People who ran towards "careers" that seemed like guaranteeing great lives are standing shortchanged and a little mystified.
The noose has been around our necks for a long time, and some of us weren't smart enough to escape when it was still loose. Now, it is tightening and tightening rapidly. It isn't as if some promises were broken! The promise was never there, and many were too stupid to see it. They loved the illusion and the ringing in of the New Year as the harbinger of something new, is the newest of them all. Happy New Year!
Saturday, November 22, 2008
The Momentum of Stupidity
For eight long years, GW Bush ruined America, taking down with him several good things he inherited from Bill Clinton's presidency. For several years longer than that, India was hijacked by archaic notions, too much government control, protectionism and corruption. Corruption still exists, but impacts us a little less these days because the government has given up some of its control. In hindsight, India was down the wrong path up until the time we nearly became bankrupt and then Manmohan Singh came along with reforms that slowly brought us to the light.
In George W Bush's case, he had the support of most of the morons in his country who were willing to panic under the threat of terrorism - to the point where they continued to support the very government that had allowed Sept 11th, attacked the wrong country, did not find the perpetrators of the greatest act of terror on its soil, lied to its people about threats, gave no bid contracts in billions and essentially stole all semblance of order! In India's case, we simply had no experience with democracy and even less with self governance. We were too busy being pious and holy that we never realized for a long time that we needed a strong economy! It took a near catastrophe to wake us up and take up reforms.
In both cases, stupidity gained momentum, simply because there weren't enough minds applied against it. What is it about humans that allows stupidity when it is so obvious? Just fear of bucking the momentum? How does stupidity gain momentum in the first place? Panic? Collective ignorance? A pathological attraction to the 'wrong' choice in case the right choice looks too good to be true?
The financial crisis that started in Wall Street and is threatening to hit a lot of people around the world is no illusion. It is the unmasking of a bag of illusions. Americans thought for a long time that they could continue building their wealth on speculation rather than productivity, by just juggling money. Stupidity again, but nobody questioned it for a long time. Now, they are being forced to re-evaluate a lot of things. India has reacted with fear in the stock market, panicked at the marketplace and is still scared for no great reason. We should have known when we made our future plans based on an exaggerated expectation of continuous growth in the foreign currency dependent outsourcing business that there could be trouble. We didn't. Stupidity gathers momentum much faster and stronger than intelligence.
The CEOs of Indian companies in the IT and BPO sectors aren't leaders but Chief Emulation Officers, who seem to blindly replicate the models of the companies they aspire to be like. Well if Citibank was one of those companies, we should be seeing a one shot 50,000 strong layoff in India soon. News just came in that our marquee "Indian" CEO of Citigroup is likely to be fired. Sounds like a good plan to me if he allowed Citigroup's market value to drop 50% in three days.
If there is one thing to learn from becoming "global" it is that there are enough and more people in senior management circles unwilling to be individually chastised for being different and visionary, while very happy to be found collectively guilty of massive stupidity later. Why shouldn't these overpaid fools lose their jobs for failing to warn their companies of impending doom? If they are "helpless" why the heck do the companies need them in the first place? A duck would be equally helpless, and would even lay eggs at a fraction of the salary. Is anybody questioning the logic of hiring dummies with MBAs? Not with the helpless watching game called stupidity that is pervading corporate India right now.
Every downturn is supposed to bring opportunities with it. With the reduced demand in oil and lowered consumption, environmentalists should be really happy that there won't be so much carbon di oxide in the atmosphere for a while, but in reality they will be unhappy that cash crunches will hold back investment in newer technologies! Add to this lower oil prices and there is no incentive at all for anyone to complain about burning more oil. The next time oil goes up, it will be at the most inopportune time and then we will look back at the stupidity of not running away from oil when we could afford to, which is now, when we have extra money that we didn't spend on expensive oil! But we're so scared now that we're most likely to make mistakes. Humans don't take pressure all that well.
Last night came the news that the big automakers in the USA didn't get the handouts they wanted. It is kind of stupid to start with, like losers asking for medals, but when the BIG 3 are not likely to share profits with the taxpaying public, why the heck should taxpayers' dollars be used to bail them out for not being competitive enough? If Toyota and Honda can do well in the same market with the same pool of labour and skill, there is no reason for GM to be complaining. Of course this has to do with not knowing how to make a single good car, but just because the impact would be huge if GM, Chrysler and Ford went bankrupt, that doesn't mean taxpayers should bail them out. That is just thievery, and the thieves have been fended off for now. There are big auto ancillary manufacturers in India that supply the big three and many are OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). They're going to hurt, without a doubt. That's the thing about momentum - you cannot stop it unless you oppose it with an equal or greater force.
Indians are going to lose their jobs. No question about that. Quite simply because we are great at competing against each other here at home, but lousy when competing against the rest of the world. While it is unlikely that Eritrea will be making more steel than India in the next fifty years, it is highly likely that we find our economy has bloated because of IT dollars and a higher standard of living that we briefly subscribed to is suddenly going to be unsustainable. We don't have to look far - we don't sell software to end users, we write software for others who sell products and solutions. The "others" are mostly American and some European. These people aren't going to do anything new for a while, and we would have rolled in the momentum of their stupidity! They're owning up to their failed economic models, but we're yet to own up to our overdependence on the US dollar. More stupidity that is not being questioned right now, because of some dangerous remnants of optimism. After all, when we love the Americans so much, you bet we bought some of their delusionary talents too!
The Indian real estate industry is getting the wake up call right now, but is not responding to it. If you ask one developer why he isn't dropping prices, he will tell you nobody else is, so he is going to wait and watch! Momentum. Nobody escapes it, and very few want to escape it. Sheep falling off the cliff, and more to follow. About a billion. The only reason Indians won't get killed jumping off the cliff is because so many of us jumped before us that the valley has been filled! When we do see prices drop, we still won't see sales pick up because people will expect prices to drop some more! That will throw more panic into the industry, and builders won't be cashing in on cheaper cement and steel prices because their moneys are stuck in unsold properties. The biggest ones will see the opportunities and wait out the trough, but the bottom feeders will all look for other industries to play in. We haven't seen the worst panic yet, but the show is coming!
Somehow the Indian government, as if it is qualified to talk about this, is throwing out assurances, based on absolutely nothing, that India is not likely to see layoffs! This is beyond stupidity. It is delusion, which has had momentum a lot longer than stupidity.
In George W Bush's case, he had the support of most of the morons in his country who were willing to panic under the threat of terrorism - to the point where they continued to support the very government that had allowed Sept 11th, attacked the wrong country, did not find the perpetrators of the greatest act of terror on its soil, lied to its people about threats, gave no bid contracts in billions and essentially stole all semblance of order! In India's case, we simply had no experience with democracy and even less with self governance. We were too busy being pious and holy that we never realized for a long time that we needed a strong economy! It took a near catastrophe to wake us up and take up reforms.
In both cases, stupidity gained momentum, simply because there weren't enough minds applied against it. What is it about humans that allows stupidity when it is so obvious? Just fear of bucking the momentum? How does stupidity gain momentum in the first place? Panic? Collective ignorance? A pathological attraction to the 'wrong' choice in case the right choice looks too good to be true?
The financial crisis that started in Wall Street and is threatening to hit a lot of people around the world is no illusion. It is the unmasking of a bag of illusions. Americans thought for a long time that they could continue building their wealth on speculation rather than productivity, by just juggling money. Stupidity again, but nobody questioned it for a long time. Now, they are being forced to re-evaluate a lot of things. India has reacted with fear in the stock market, panicked at the marketplace and is still scared for no great reason. We should have known when we made our future plans based on an exaggerated expectation of continuous growth in the foreign currency dependent outsourcing business that there could be trouble. We didn't. Stupidity gathers momentum much faster and stronger than intelligence.
The CEOs of Indian companies in the IT and BPO sectors aren't leaders but Chief Emulation Officers, who seem to blindly replicate the models of the companies they aspire to be like. Well if Citibank was one of those companies, we should be seeing a one shot 50,000 strong layoff in India soon. News just came in that our marquee "Indian" CEO of Citigroup is likely to be fired. Sounds like a good plan to me if he allowed Citigroup's market value to drop 50% in three days.
If there is one thing to learn from becoming "global" it is that there are enough and more people in senior management circles unwilling to be individually chastised for being different and visionary, while very happy to be found collectively guilty of massive stupidity later. Why shouldn't these overpaid fools lose their jobs for failing to warn their companies of impending doom? If they are "helpless" why the heck do the companies need them in the first place? A duck would be equally helpless, and would even lay eggs at a fraction of the salary. Is anybody questioning the logic of hiring dummies with MBAs? Not with the helpless watching game called stupidity that is pervading corporate India right now.
Every downturn is supposed to bring opportunities with it. With the reduced demand in oil and lowered consumption, environmentalists should be really happy that there won't be so much carbon di oxide in the atmosphere for a while, but in reality they will be unhappy that cash crunches will hold back investment in newer technologies! Add to this lower oil prices and there is no incentive at all for anyone to complain about burning more oil. The next time oil goes up, it will be at the most inopportune time and then we will look back at the stupidity of not running away from oil when we could afford to, which is now, when we have extra money that we didn't spend on expensive oil! But we're so scared now that we're most likely to make mistakes. Humans don't take pressure all that well.
Last night came the news that the big automakers in the USA didn't get the handouts they wanted. It is kind of stupid to start with, like losers asking for medals, but when the BIG 3 are not likely to share profits with the taxpaying public, why the heck should taxpayers' dollars be used to bail them out for not being competitive enough? If Toyota and Honda can do well in the same market with the same pool of labour and skill, there is no reason for GM to be complaining. Of course this has to do with not knowing how to make a single good car, but just because the impact would be huge if GM, Chrysler and Ford went bankrupt, that doesn't mean taxpayers should bail them out. That is just thievery, and the thieves have been fended off for now. There are big auto ancillary manufacturers in India that supply the big three and many are OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). They're going to hurt, without a doubt. That's the thing about momentum - you cannot stop it unless you oppose it with an equal or greater force.
Indians are going to lose their jobs. No question about that. Quite simply because we are great at competing against each other here at home, but lousy when competing against the rest of the world. While it is unlikely that Eritrea will be making more steel than India in the next fifty years, it is highly likely that we find our economy has bloated because of IT dollars and a higher standard of living that we briefly subscribed to is suddenly going to be unsustainable. We don't have to look far - we don't sell software to end users, we write software for others who sell products and solutions. The "others" are mostly American and some European. These people aren't going to do anything new for a while, and we would have rolled in the momentum of their stupidity! They're owning up to their failed economic models, but we're yet to own up to our overdependence on the US dollar. More stupidity that is not being questioned right now, because of some dangerous remnants of optimism. After all, when we love the Americans so much, you bet we bought some of their delusionary talents too!
The Indian real estate industry is getting the wake up call right now, but is not responding to it. If you ask one developer why he isn't dropping prices, he will tell you nobody else is, so he is going to wait and watch! Momentum. Nobody escapes it, and very few want to escape it. Sheep falling off the cliff, and more to follow. About a billion. The only reason Indians won't get killed jumping off the cliff is because so many of us jumped before us that the valley has been filled! When we do see prices drop, we still won't see sales pick up because people will expect prices to drop some more! That will throw more panic into the industry, and builders won't be cashing in on cheaper cement and steel prices because their moneys are stuck in unsold properties. The biggest ones will see the opportunities and wait out the trough, but the bottom feeders will all look for other industries to play in. We haven't seen the worst panic yet, but the show is coming!
Somehow the Indian government, as if it is qualified to talk about this, is throwing out assurances, based on absolutely nothing, that India is not likely to see layoffs! This is beyond stupidity. It is delusion, which has had momentum a lot longer than stupidity.
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financial,
government,
indian,
insecurity,
jobs,
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Monday, October 20, 2008
The heady smell of failure
Most good stories come full circle. The adventurers who return to their village, the hero who comes back to his roots, richer for the ride and wiser for the experience, but essentially coming back to starting point after victory to share it with his tribe. The sense of belonging is one we can all identify with, and is used in no small measure by good story tellers. But for that, we must identify with the characters, the journey they chose to go on, and the ordeals on the way that made them better. In the very least, we must care.
Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.
There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?
More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.
But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!
What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.
The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?
So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?
Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.
There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?
More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.
But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!
What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.
The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?
So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?
Monday, October 13, 2008
What meltdown?
This financial "m e l t d o w n" that our media loves to directly copy from American media is to say the least, comical. Why can't the fools who get paid insane amounts of money to serve as financial experts see a bubble when it is blowing sky high? It isn't as if Wall Street didn't know this was coming. But nobody wanted to poke the balloon and question the unreality of banks that lent fifty times their asset base, and obviously American borrowers were stupid enough to buy homes they could not afford now, but based on how much their precious homes would be worth thirty years down the line!
Stupidity - and this is fast becoming my favourite word - is always expensive. The speculative optimism of American people doesn't border on stupidity, it is entrenched and enshrined in it. Just after Sept 11th, I had a conversation with an American man - I told him I wanted no part of the American Dream where each citizen owed an average of $36,000. He brushed off my concern and said his money was making him more than he was paying for. In other words, he was telling me that his investments were raking in good returns while he was paying a small interest on the money he owed. Of course that means some bank was being a sucker and he was in a good part of the food chain, where he could essentially grow fat without doing much.
Somehow, in a connected world, when you are unproductive, you tend to get your arse kicked sooner or later. Sure enough, American banks went crazy over easy money they were making based on home values bloating all over the place, and it is such a great economy that there were a great number of people buying homes, and then refinancing them to pocket a good chunk of money every so many years, and the few that weren't able to pay were becoming an acceptable percentage of repossessions. Now, in a bad economy, which Bush and Co. ensured Americans would face, people's confidence tends to sag as incomes aren't as rosy as they used to be, and jobs are harder to come by as more and more money went to Iraq and for buying oil!
So, a lot of loans went bad, and repossessions meant nothing when there were no "other customers" to push those homes to. The bubble had already burst but nobody was willing to use the word "recession" in case it threw people into a bigger panic. See, it is all about perception, and relying on perception instead of knowledge is .. you said it, "stupidity". The stock market is all about perception too. Stock value is buoyed up by the perception of a company doing well and how badly people want or do not want to be a part of that company. Fair enough if things are going well. But when one thing connects to another and big lending institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have to face the reality of having bet on the bubble, all they get is soap water.
So, Bush, after pissing away billions in Iraq, and having done nothing to improve his country's competitiveness or productivity (America consumes 6% to 7% more than it produces), knowing fully well that the Chinese own the 3 trillion dollars of credit card debt that Americans have all accumulated, did nothing but put on a show for the fools watching the superfool on TV. The reason he could afford this luxury was because for nearly the entire second half of the last century, America was the engine for the world's economy, by the power of consumption alone. But to get to the bottom of it all, at some point, laziness comes at a price, and when America isn't quite as productive as it once was, it is bound to be forced to correct itself. Add high oil prices to this mess, and Americans are really being squeezed - because, guess what, surprise, surprise, they also consume the most oil per capita! (It is another matter that the USA with 4% of the world's population also consumes 25% of the world's energy)
So, as money kept drying up in American institutions, others stepped in to lend, because who doesn't want the animal that consumes so much? It's like a bar loves big drinkers, but doesn't like drunkards! As if debt is going to really mean anything if the borrower commits suicide! That suicide is what is being prevented by Bush and Co. with this famous 700 billion dollar "bailout", but the joke continues beyond the American tax payer!
This is what the "liquidity crunch" is really due to. Americans could show their houses as their "piggy banks" (to quote George Soros) and keep borrowing and spending out of notoriously good "refinancing" schemes! But when the housing bubble burst, everything went down the toilet rather fast! Houses were suddenly worth less, or worthless depending on how candid you want to be, and banks couldn't do much beyond gawk, since there were hundreds of such bad loans and nobody to palm the bad loans off to, based on these houses!
Since most banks are international institutions now, money flows across borders quite a bit in this free market economy we have all signed on for. It is all nice and dandy when our products and services are being consumed by others, and when we are raking in the money, but not quite so nice when we lend to unproductive fools. Luckily India doesn't usually lend to unproductive fools, and we are rather tight fisted about giving out large loans based on sentiments. That is the reason our economy here in India is fundamentally sound and nearly impossible to whip up to any frenzied activity - in growth or in decline. We are, thankfully, like financial donkeys.
The clowns on Dalal Street that are busy selling in panic induced frenzy clearly do not have an understanding of realities beyond their own sentiments. The idiots who spread rumours about ICICI going down, without even checking the facts on the ground, sent text messages to people that their insurance companies were going down are nothing but idiots who suddenly see themselves as "global" carriers of panic, who reel under imaginary winds of enormous change, who almost by whim or fashion, have to react to something like this, just in case they don't look out of place!
Quite staggeringly, there are a lot of people here in India, that seriously believe America will not pay that heavy a price for its follies. They feel that some "innovative" move will give them a genius break out of this and somehow the American financial flag will fly high again very soon. That is not a bad wish, and this is not to piss on the optimism or wish anything bad on American people, but from my understanding of "fundamentals" of any economy, you have to produce more than you consume in order to be competitive.
America needs to find a way to become competitive again. It is as simple as that, but for that to materialize, a lot of things have to fundamentally change, starting from curing the fever of betting a large amount of money on speculation of unending growth. That kind of growth is no longer happening in America. It is happening in India and China, but both these countries have such enormous cushions of populations that are coming into new habits of consumerism coupled with good, traditional, conservative fiscal sense, that there is hope we won't repeat the mistakes of the West here in the East.
I remember the time in the 90s when the developed "world" complained that India wasn't opening up its economy soon enough, while Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Far East were doing that. I remember our wise men didn't follow suit and sure enough all tigers turned out to be made of paper and India stood strong enough. It is no different now, but there is madness in the air of this New India. Baseless madness. Financial meltdown, my left foot toe, we have a bit of a character meltdown!
Stupidity - and this is fast becoming my favourite word - is always expensive. The speculative optimism of American people doesn't border on stupidity, it is entrenched and enshrined in it. Just after Sept 11th, I had a conversation with an American man - I told him I wanted no part of the American Dream where each citizen owed an average of $36,000. He brushed off my concern and said his money was making him more than he was paying for. In other words, he was telling me that his investments were raking in good returns while he was paying a small interest on the money he owed. Of course that means some bank was being a sucker and he was in a good part of the food chain, where he could essentially grow fat without doing much.
Somehow, in a connected world, when you are unproductive, you tend to get your arse kicked sooner or later. Sure enough, American banks went crazy over easy money they were making based on home values bloating all over the place, and it is such a great economy that there were a great number of people buying homes, and then refinancing them to pocket a good chunk of money every so many years, and the few that weren't able to pay were becoming an acceptable percentage of repossessions. Now, in a bad economy, which Bush and Co. ensured Americans would face, people's confidence tends to sag as incomes aren't as rosy as they used to be, and jobs are harder to come by as more and more money went to Iraq and for buying oil!
So, a lot of loans went bad, and repossessions meant nothing when there were no "other customers" to push those homes to. The bubble had already burst but nobody was willing to use the word "recession" in case it threw people into a bigger panic. See, it is all about perception, and relying on perception instead of knowledge is .. you said it, "stupidity". The stock market is all about perception too. Stock value is buoyed up by the perception of a company doing well and how badly people want or do not want to be a part of that company. Fair enough if things are going well. But when one thing connects to another and big lending institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have to face the reality of having bet on the bubble, all they get is soap water.
So, Bush, after pissing away billions in Iraq, and having done nothing to improve his country's competitiveness or productivity (America consumes 6% to 7% more than it produces), knowing fully well that the Chinese own the 3 trillion dollars of credit card debt that Americans have all accumulated, did nothing but put on a show for the fools watching the superfool on TV. The reason he could afford this luxury was because for nearly the entire second half of the last century, America was the engine for the world's economy, by the power of consumption alone. But to get to the bottom of it all, at some point, laziness comes at a price, and when America isn't quite as productive as it once was, it is bound to be forced to correct itself. Add high oil prices to this mess, and Americans are really being squeezed - because, guess what, surprise, surprise, they also consume the most oil per capita! (It is another matter that the USA with 4% of the world's population also consumes 25% of the world's energy)
So, as money kept drying up in American institutions, others stepped in to lend, because who doesn't want the animal that consumes so much? It's like a bar loves big drinkers, but doesn't like drunkards! As if debt is going to really mean anything if the borrower commits suicide! That suicide is what is being prevented by Bush and Co. with this famous 700 billion dollar "bailout", but the joke continues beyond the American tax payer!
This is what the "liquidity crunch" is really due to. Americans could show their houses as their "piggy banks" (to quote George Soros) and keep borrowing and spending out of notoriously good "refinancing" schemes! But when the housing bubble burst, everything went down the toilet rather fast! Houses were suddenly worth less, or worthless depending on how candid you want to be, and banks couldn't do much beyond gawk, since there were hundreds of such bad loans and nobody to palm the bad loans off to, based on these houses!
Since most banks are international institutions now, money flows across borders quite a bit in this free market economy we have all signed on for. It is all nice and dandy when our products and services are being consumed by others, and when we are raking in the money, but not quite so nice when we lend to unproductive fools. Luckily India doesn't usually lend to unproductive fools, and we are rather tight fisted about giving out large loans based on sentiments. That is the reason our economy here in India is fundamentally sound and nearly impossible to whip up to any frenzied activity - in growth or in decline. We are, thankfully, like financial donkeys.
The clowns on Dalal Street that are busy selling in panic induced frenzy clearly do not have an understanding of realities beyond their own sentiments. The idiots who spread rumours about ICICI going down, without even checking the facts on the ground, sent text messages to people that their insurance companies were going down are nothing but idiots who suddenly see themselves as "global" carriers of panic, who reel under imaginary winds of enormous change, who almost by whim or fashion, have to react to something like this, just in case they don't look out of place!
Quite staggeringly, there are a lot of people here in India, that seriously believe America will not pay that heavy a price for its follies. They feel that some "innovative" move will give them a genius break out of this and somehow the American financial flag will fly high again very soon. That is not a bad wish, and this is not to piss on the optimism or wish anything bad on American people, but from my understanding of "fundamentals" of any economy, you have to produce more than you consume in order to be competitive.
America needs to find a way to become competitive again. It is as simple as that, but for that to materialize, a lot of things have to fundamentally change, starting from curing the fever of betting a large amount of money on speculation of unending growth. That kind of growth is no longer happening in America. It is happening in India and China, but both these countries have such enormous cushions of populations that are coming into new habits of consumerism coupled with good, traditional, conservative fiscal sense, that there is hope we won't repeat the mistakes of the West here in the East.
I remember the time in the 90s when the developed "world" complained that India wasn't opening up its economy soon enough, while Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Far East were doing that. I remember our wise men didn't follow suit and sure enough all tigers turned out to be made of paper and India stood strong enough. It is no different now, but there is madness in the air of this New India. Baseless madness. Financial meltdown, my left foot toe, we have a bit of a character meltdown!
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