Alex's Weblog

Milan

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:19:00 +0000

One thing I noticed about Europe
is that many countries use negative
integers to denote underground floors,
such as "-1" in the above picture. This
makes perfect mathematical sense
and I love it :P

As many of you know, Europeans take
summer vacation to enjoy their lives. This
shop was closed from August 7 to 31. Can
we have something like this in the U.S.?

Street view outside the Milan Cathedral

Milan Cathedral

Tourists have the choice to pay more to
take an elevator to get to the top of the
cathedral but we decided to take the
stairs as we thought that it'd be "fun"

I like the arches

A view of the square from above

It turned out that it wasn't
that "fun" to climb 100+ stair
steps. But the view there was
worth it :)

Italians aren't that good at English in
general. They got us the wrong pizza
even though we pointed at the picture
of the one we wanted. Well, it was still a
Milan pizza and pretty yummy :)

Venice

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:30:00 +0000

Venice is really beautiful. The only bad thing was that there were just too many tourists there. I guess this is a curse of any beautiful place: if it's beautiful, people will rush there and it's not as beautiful anymore...

Venice is so beautiful that even
photos taken by amateurs like
me are pretty :P

Another view of the buildings
taken when we were heading
to San Marco Square

St Mark's Campanile

I really love the long and
slender alleys in Venice

Another alley. There're
hundreds of alleys like that

This cup of espresso and the tart were
super yummy! We had them at a pastry
shop called Rizzo. That little piece of
chocolate was an ingenious compliment
to the espresso! They're so good that
I'll go back to Venice just to try
them again :)

Love the composition of this
photo

So it has been three years

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:20:00 +0000

Today marks the third birthday of this blog. As you should have noticed, I post much less frequently now. Someday I'll devote my time to this blog (when will that someday come?)...

Yes, I still love blogging!

Happy Birthday Alex's Weblog :)

St. Peter's Basilica

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 07:01:00 +0000

I'll be posting some of the better (well, better relative to my photography skills...) photos of my Europe trip in coming posts. Hope that you'll like them :)

So, let's start with St. Peter's Basilica in Rome:

You gotta cover enough
portion of your body to
get in :P

It would be great if the woman
wasn't there? There were just
too many tourists at hot attractions
like St. Peter's Basilica

I really like silhouette shots :)

"It appeared to be a green light to me"

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:12:00 +0000

A physicist was pulled over by a police officer. The police officer asked

"Do you know that you just ran a red light?"

"No. It appeared to be a green light to me. Maybe I was driving a bit too fast."

"Alright sir", said the officer with a grin on his face. "I'll have to give you a speeding ticket then since you must have been driving at around, hmmmm, 110,000,000 mph. With an extra penalty of $5 per mph over 60 mph, it's just a fine of 550 million dollars."

"Ehhh... Actually, I think I ran a red light."

P.S. Created based on a question in my college physics textbook :)

The Secret That Cannot Be Told (不能說的秘密) - Jay Chou

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:52:00 +0000

冷咖啡離開了杯墊
我忍住的情緒在很後面
拼命想挽回的從前
在我臉上依舊清晰可見

最美的不是下雨天
是曾與你躲過雨的屋簷
回憶的畫面　
在盪著鞦韆　
夢開始不甜

你說把愛漸漸放下會走更遠
又何必去改變已錯過的時間
你用你的指尖
阻止我說再見
想像你在身邊
在完全失去之前

你說把愛漸漸放下會走更遠
或許命運的籤　
只讓我們遇見
只讓我們相戀　
這一季的秋天
飄落後才發現　
這幸福的碎片
要我怎麼撿

P.S. Kwai Lun-mei (桂綸鎂)'s temperament is really special.

Los Angeles to Tokyo the Kayaking Way

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:43:00 +0000

Two years ago, I wrote about how Google Maps instructs you to swim across the Atlantic Ocean when you search for directions between Los Angeles and Paris. Apparently, Google Maps has been improved by the Google engineers since then: I just search for directions between Los Angeles and Tokyo and it tells me to kayak across the Pacific Ocean:

For some reason, Google Maps thinks that I should travel to Seattle first before throwing myself into the kayak. Maybe kayaking is prohibited on the beaches of Los Angeles? (-.-)

Not only is kayaking "less tiring" than swimming but Google Maps is thoughtful enough to advise me to visit Hawaii on the way. I can have a good rest (anyone needs a rest after 2756 miles of kayaking) and some fun there!

And, after another 3879 miles of kayaking, we're finally entering Japan. Do I need to show my passport if I land this way? :)

For some reason, it can't find directions between Los Angeles and Paris now

Maybe the Atlantic Ocean isn't that safe to swim across now? :P

Paint My Love - Michael Learns To Rock

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:28:00 +0000

From my youngest years
Till this moment here
I've never seen
Such a lovely queen

From the skies above
To the deepest love
I've never felt
Crazy like this before

Paint my love
You should paint my love
It's the picture of a thousand sunsets
It's the freedom of a thousand doves
Baby you should paint my love

Been around the world
Then I met you girl
It's like comming home
To a place I've known

Paint my love
You should paint my love
It's the picture of a thousand sunsets
It's the freedom of a thousand doves
Baby you should paint my love

Since you came into my life
The days before all fade to black and white
Since you came into my life
Everything has changed

Michael Jackson (1958 - 2009)

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:38:00 +0000

So our King of Pop died today... (-__- )

Michael Jackson's influence was without border. From inmates at CPDRC in Philipines to waiters at a wedding banquet to Final Fantasy to Indians, few stars had such a big impact to the music industry, no, to the entire world. He was truly a legend...

I went to the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center and took some pictures:

People started gathering in
the afternoon

Lots of people at the
UCLA Medical Plaza

ABC7 Eyewitness News

Of course, NBC

Traffic was so heavy because
of the crowd

People walked toward the Ronald
Reagan Medical Center

Right outside of the main entrance of
the Ronald Reagan Medical Center

Four helicopters reporting the
incident

Some reporters were trying to
get inside via the side door

KCAL9 News

A cute little MJ

Either the woman or the guy
(V sign in the photo) made the word
"Michael" with flowers

Two black men who lead the crowd
for a parade were interviewed by
some reporter

It was 9 pm something and people
still didn't want to leave

This guy has been holding this posture
for at least 5 hours (see the flower "Michael"
photo above)

Fans left candles and flowers for
Michael outside of the hospital

For the one last time, goodbye Michael...

P.S. Two videos that I took at the UCLA Medical Plaza with fans singing Michael's songs:

Obama's speech in Cairo, Egypt

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 08:34:00 +0000

I always believe that violence is never a solution when there're conflicts among people, races, religions or countries. Yet, quite a lot of people in this world resort to violence and it only fosters hatred among people generation after generation (I've been hearing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since I was a kid).

Although I believe that many people share my view on this issue, I was moved when I heard that Obama expressed the same opinion.

It's one thing to believe in something. It's another thing when the commander-in-chief also shares the same belief.

As capable as the citizens of a country are, people need a leader to lead the country in the right direction; Obama is doing that now.

In an old post I conservatively claimed that Obama is the right choice because he has a smaller chance of screwing up compared to McCain/Palin. Now, I start to believe that he really is the right choice as the President of the United States, which is a role that has tremendous impact not only in America but the entire world.

President Obama, thank you for being very hard-working. Thank you for making the government a lot more transparent. Thank you for including capable people in your administration regardless of their races, backgrounds and political parties. And, last but not least, thank you for making an effort to lead us to a more peaceful world.

Please stay healthy and don't tire yourself out (play some basketball regularly!) . May God bless you :)

How super-duper tiny we all are

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:10:00 +0000

Today I received an email from a friend that features comparisons of the planets in our solar system with the various giant stars in the universe and it elicited my quest to find out what the largest star is known to human as of now.

After some googling, the answer is VY Canis Majoris, which has a radius that's around 2000 times the one of the sun, which in turn has a radius that's around 109 times the one of the earth.

How large is that? Watch the following video and you'll see at the end how large the sun is compared to VY Canis Majoris:

Now, can you imagine how small human being is? In that sense, how big is the problem that's puzzling you today? Not that big really :)

P.S. Just to give you another perspective how ridiculously tiny the earth is in this gigantic universe, look at the following two images :P

Image from Wikimedia.org

Image source unknown (let me know
if you know)

Hope

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sun, 24 May 2009 22:16:00 +0000

A beam of light in absolute darkness. Love this photo :)

Wide Ocean and Empty Sky (海濶天空) - Phoebus Chan

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Thu, 07 May 2009 07:26:00 +0000

Can't really think of a good translation of the song title.. But, yeah, one of the most famous songs by Beyond very well articulated by Phoebus :)

P.S. If anyone know where I can see Phoebus' performance in Hong Kong, please let me know. I really want to see him play!

What's wrong with being normal?

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:15:00 +0000

I'm a big Heroes fan. Although the narrative of the episodes in recent seasons aren't that excited anymore, I still watch it every Monday night.

Guess who my favorite character is?

Hiro? Yeah he's cute, but no. Claire? She's cute too, but no. Parkman? No. Peter? No.

Alright, let me tell you. Yeah, it's Sylar, the ultimate villain of the series.

"Oh why? He's a devil! Why would you like him??"

What Sylar fascinates me isn't his powers or evilness. The things that catch my attention are the internal struggles he had that eventually made him a monster.

One scene in the episode "The Hard Part" in season one gave me a strong impression: when Sylar visited his mother and eventually killed her. The following is a paragraph from Heroes Wiki about that scene:

As Sylar arrives at his destination, Hiro and Ando sneak around to a window to keep an eye on him. They are surprised to discover that the person Sylar is visiting is his mother, Virginia Gray, who seems happy to see him and is quite unaware of his recent activities. He decides to fix one of his father's old clocks, and his mother laments on how watchmaking is not a real profession; she suggests that he become an investment banker instead. He asks his mother to accept his desire to remain a normal watchmaker, but his mother refuses, saying she knows Sylar is special enough to be President if he wanted.

When Sylar's mom told him that it's not okay to be just a regular watchmaker, Sylar said the following:

"Mom — Mom, don't. Don't, it's just... maybe I don't have to be special. That's okay to just be a normal watchmaker. Can't you just tell me that's enough?"

Yeah, why can't we just be normal?

No, at least the modern world we live in now doesn't seem to agree. It's almost a sin to remain normal. Everyone should advance his/her career, climb the corporate ladder, be a manager, be a CEO, or even better, be a boss. Be rich, be significant, be special.

Last month, two episodes of Sunday Report became very popular in Hong Kong: "港男．講女" ("Hong Kong Guys Talking About Hong Kong Girls") and "港女．講男" ("Hong Kong Girls Talking About Hong Kong Guys"). In the latter episode, the Hong Kong girls in general expressed the following requirements for their boyfriends:

Confident
Good at communication
Have quite an above-average income
Well-educated (at least a bachelor degree I'd say)
Desire to advance in career (In Cantonese, it's 上進心)
Be significant (In Cantonese it's 出色, which means having certain status/authority/achievement in society)

Don't get me wrong, all the things listed above are some very good attributes that every guy should strive for. The thing is, how many guys can actually achieve all these goals?

If you study some kind of probability or statistics before, you should know what a normal distribution is. Never heard of it before? See the diagram below:

Image from Wikimedia Commons

To satisfy all the requirements I list above, I think that a guy will have to fall beyond one standard deviation from the mean (to the right of 1σ). What does that mean? That means that this guy is among the top 16% (no need to argue with me with the exactness of the percentage; my argument makes sense for, say, 30% too) of the population.

Surely, it's a woman's freedom to set whatever requirements she wants for her spouse. After all, it's someone who's supposed to be with her for the rest of her life, how can she make compromise?

Yes, I agree. However, having no room to compromise doesn't mean that the requirements are realistic. Marriage is a one-to-one relationship; how can the top 16% be enough for all the Hong Kong women? This is also true vice versa; it'd be unrealistic for all men to look for women in the top 16% (be it beauty, education, wisdom, kindness, you name it).

Actually, what really annoys me isn't the lovableness of normal people; after all, this is mostly a personal issue. The thing that does annoys me is the view that people who're normal don't deserve the same respect that significant people receive.

In the "港男．講女" Sunday Report program, one Hong Kong girl actually said this

"Honestly speaking, if you're poor, people will look down on you."

This may be the fact, but she said it in a way that it's okay to hold such a attitude.

Wow, do you know how many poor people there're in this world? According to the standard of living in Hong Kong and the Global Rich List, she'd probably have to look down on at least 85% of the people in the world. How many is 85%? Not that many, just around 5.7 billion. This kind of attitude is just plain crazy.

To my mind, a person deserves respect as long as s/he

Brings value to society: This requirement is satisfied if you've a legal job and you respect what you do
Is considerate: Care about others' feelings, such as telling your taste without hurting others

I do understand why people generally don't like living in a poor neighborhood: not because the people there are poor but the fact that poor people are usually inconsiderate. For example, people in ghetto areas often have dogs that bark throughout the night and make it difficult for their neighbors to fall asleep. Those people deserve to not be respected but they're not the normal people I'm talking about in this post.

In one episode of a BBC tourism program that I watched some years ago, they visited a little store in Italy that sells all kind of fruit jams. After the store owner (an old man) enthusiastically showed the program host the manufacturing process of his jams, the host said to him with admiration

"I can tell that you're a man who loves what you do."

"Yes, I do." Said the owner with a grateful smile on his face.

That old store owner may not make that much money since he only sells the jams in the small town he lives in. He may not have any ambition to be Knott's Berry Farm. He may not even have a bachelor's degree. He's probably just an insignificant old man that only the residents in his local town know had BBC not visited him.

Given all that, can you think of any reason why he doesn't deserve respect that significant people like Walter Knott (the founder of Knott's Berry Farm) receive?

We do need significant and powerful people like President Obama in this world. Nevertheless, it's unrealistic and unfair to ask everyone to be rich and significant. A normal watchmaker, a regular computer technician like Peter and a peaceful old man selling james in his little town are just as respectable as any normal person out there.

A tribute to George Kadzis

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:11:00 +0000

Tonight's Extreme Makeover Home Edition is one of the few episodes that touched me. George Kadzis, the father of the family who received the help from Extreme Makeover, suffered from brain cancer and died around two days after their new house was built.

I always believe in helping people who deserve it and I think the Kadzis family really did deserve it: they adopted six disabled children from China. Beside extra financial burden, you have to spend a lot of time to look after the adopted children. That's why I always admire people who adopt children without asking anything in return.

Yeah, there are many poor orphans who need help in China and we can't save them all. But they can be saved one at a time, and I'm pretty sure that's what Geroge thought too.

I appreciate the sponsors of the TV program like Sears and those home builders. Yes, they benefit from the advertising of their products/services during the program, but they are also doing some good deeds to society. It's much better than simply paying an agent to create a viral ad.

It seems unfair that people with a kind heart like George would die due to a horrible and painful disease like brain cancer (ABC didn't show his face in the epsisode so I could imagine how the brain tumors have deformed his appearance). However, people who are inspired by him will bring hopes to the most hopeless places in the world, just like how George himself was inspired by Stevie Wonder after he listend to his performance in the 70's.

I can only manage to take care of myself and possibly my own future family now. Someday I wish I can do more though...

Need to take a break...

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:25:00 +0000

I'm so busy these days that I don't think I can write on this blog regularly anymore... I still have lots of topics that I'd like to talk about but I just can't squeeze time out to do that. Maybe I assumed too many responsibilities since I didn't say no enough?

Anyways I'll still blog whenever I've time but just don't expect the regular posting frequency I've been keeping. My readers, thank you for reading my blog all along and I hope that you've gained something valuable from my posts. See you soon! :)

The Legend of Wind (風の伝説) - Joe Hisaishi

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 08:59:00 +0000

I still remember that I was so captivated with Joe Hisaishi's music when I was small. This one is one of my favorites from the animated film Nausicaä of The Valley Of The Wind. Man, the film was produced in 1984! 25 years ago already...

The Banana Chocolate Chip Muffin at Mimi's Cafe

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:21:00 +0000

Went to Mimi's Cafe last week to use the free breakfast coupon and discovered its very delicious Banana Chocolate Chip Muffin:

I think that warming up a muffin makes it
a lot tastier. Serving it with butter is very
important too :P (Alright, I know it's fat)

Their Seafood Fettuccine was good too. I like
the scallop and shrimp.

This is the free breakfast we got: Crab
and Avocado Omelette. Not that
remarkable but, well, it's free.

On our way out, we saw a McDonald's with
a line across its logo. Is it a real McDonald's?
(O__O )

Annoying Windows restart popup

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 06:25:00 +0000

Whenever Windows XP gets an update that requires a restart, the following popup will keep showing up no matter how many times you click "Restart Later":

If you insist that we should restart, why ask the question in the first place?? They can simply remind us to restart when we log off. And one time it actually restarted my machine when I was away from my PC (yeah, for more than their five-minute countdown) and all my unsaved work was lost.

Sometimes I just don't know what the software engineers at Microsoft are thinking.. (~__~ )

七百年後 (After 700 years) - Eason Chan

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:11:00 +0000

Excellent MTV for WALL•E! The song is sung by Eason. If you can read Chinese, you'd notice that the lyrics matches the story very well :)

P.S. Again, if you've not watched WALL•E, watch it! It's worth every second of your time.

An interview of Ricky Wong (王维基)

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:24:00 +0000

There're two people whose values and life philosophies are very similar to mine: CK and Ricky Wong. Here's a good interview of Ricky conducted by Stephen Chan:

Let me share some of my thoughts about the interview with you.

Tool is neutral

He's ruthless and persistent on things that he believes are right. When he was in high school, he asked the principal whether they could bring cards back to school because they wanted to form a Bridge Club. Back in those days, adults often related cards with gambling and so the principal rejected him.

However, he didn't give up. He told the principal that many of his schoolmates learned martial arts at school and if these skills were used in the wrong way (fighting) it would be bad to the school too. At last, the principal changed his mind and let them bring cards to school.

The morale of of this story is that

Tool, including money, is a neutral thing. Whether it's good or bad depends on how you use it.

Of course, we shouldn't let young kids play with knives. After they pass a certain age, however, we should let them know that what knives are used for and and give them the freedom to use it; let them make decisions and learn from mistakes.

Risk taking

Although he said in the beginning that he's a timid person but I don't think so at all. He's actually a very good risk taker.

One time, he tried to bring around HK$120,000 into Taiwan to buy books for his business. Because there was a limit of the money (HK$40,000 per person) one can bring through the customs, the officers denied his entry.

After thinking for a while, he decided to give HK$80,000 to a couple and asked them to bring it through the gate and then give the money back to him on the other side. This certainly carried quite a good deal of risks since the couple could have grabbed the money and run. Nevertheless, he believed that the couple is trustworthy and they did gave that HK$80,000 to him afterward.

This world is full of risks and opportunities. Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who have the ability to measure various kind of risks and take them when the potential rewards are worth it. If you play chess with me before, you would notice that I'm not a very good risk taker. That's why this is one thing that I should learn from Ricky.

Physiognomy

One reason Ricky trusted that couple at the airport was that he could tell they're honest people from their appearance.

Physiognomy has a long history in China. When I was small, I always thought that it's just some mysterious belief with no scientific foundation. In recent years, however, I started to believe that it's indeed a study of the statistics of how human facial characteristics are related to characters.

A good example of that is "Hong Kong Girl" (港女). To my English reader, "Hong Kong Girl" are generally defined as the Hong Kong girls who are very self-centered and materialistic. From my experience, it's not difficult to tell whether a girl is "Hong Kong Girl" from her look such as makeup, clothes, and, most importantly (although it's not appearance technically), the way she talks.

Judging people from their appearance has been condemned and underrated for long and I hope that it'll see some light after scientists conduct research on it. After all, it's a very useful skill (like how Ricky interviews people in 5 minutes) :P

Media's Big Influence

The media is very good at focusing on and "enlarging" certain words that a celebrity says and ignoring the rest of the story. They do that since it can boost the sales of their newspaper/magazines/TV ads/whatever. A by-product of that, sadly, is that they also give you a false/unfair impression of the things and people of an incident.

For example, Ricky once asked a Miss Asia whether her breast is "real". Not surprisingly, the media found that it was a great title for their top news and used big font for these few words. Now that you watched Ricky's interview, you should realize that he was trying to test how well the Miss Asia's could respond to surprising/embarrassing questions (the Miss Asia's were well aware of this before he asked the questions).

Knowing the entirety of the incident, although I can't deny that the question is insulting by itself, it wasn't really much of a big deal given the context.

The media wasn't lying. To my mind, however, reporting part of the truth while intentionally ignoring the rest isn't much better than lying. After all, they both lead to the same result: give you a false impression of the truth.

So, instead of making a judgment right after you hear one side of a story, try listening to other sides of the story first. Having a certain degree of skepticism is always healthy.

Last but not least: the importance of family

At the end of the interview, Ricky acknowledged that he didn't spend enough time with his two children because of his busy career life.

Career success is important but we shall not forget about our family. That's why I define, as mentioned in my previous post before, a successful person to be someone who 1) brings great value to this world and 2) has a happy family. Although it's not easy, let's hope that we can all strike a good balance between the two :)

Free Breakfast at Mimi's Cafe

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:53:00 +0000

You can get a free breakfast at a participating Mimi's Cafe by joining their E-Club:

Image from Mimi's Cafe

You can only use one offer per party and the free entree can't exceed $10. Still an okay deal though :P

Some rants about this financial crisis

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:10:00 +0000

This post has quite some rants about the financial crisis we have now. If you'd like to acquire some background of this tremendous mess, watch the excellent video below created by Jonathan Jarvis first:

So, who should we really blame for this humongous financial mess that led to hundreds of thousands of layoffs not only in the finance sector but basically every industries?

Apparently, the banks' irresponsible lending practice was a major cause; had they not done this, the investment banks wouldn't have the opportunity to utilize their leverage and buy thousands of subprime loans. To my mind, however, the government is the biggest culprit behind all this mess.

"How come? The banks were so crazy that they lent huge sums of money to people without a decent credit score or even income proof! They're the biggest culprit!"

Well, if a system has holes in it, people will always abuse them to maximize their gains.

Wake up guys. You're not living in a wonderland. You've to assume that a substantial number of people are greedy and selfish. The most important thing a government should do is to make sure that when greedy people earn their money, they also bring some values to society. Ideally, the more money they earn, the more values should be resulted. Even if you cannot make these two things proportional, at least make sure they're doing no harm.

Both the government and the banks have bad systems. Let's take a look at the banks first.

If you read Joel's article "How Hard Could it be?: Sin of Commissions", you'll see how a shoe chain cashier earned his commission while driving down the net income of the business with hard-to-find coupons. Similarly, if you give your loan officers commissions based on the number of mortgages they solicited and the values of the loans, they'll sacrifice the things you're not measuring just to make sure these two benchmarks look good on paper.

"The borrowers don't have income proof? No problem. I will 'make it work'."

"How? The underwriter will reject the loan right?"

"Haha you must be kidding me. The underwriter is just a small potato. Who's he to say anything when our CEO says that it's okay to do subprime loans?"

And, guess what, the CEO's bonus is based on the revenue of the bank in that year (Will we be still okay in 2008? Who cares?).

If I claim that this financial mess was unavoidable because no freaking bankers was able to see that they were generating a housing bubble, you must say that I'm out of mind.

I mean, how could they NOT KNOW? Even if the low-rank loan officers didn't know because they couldn't see the big picture, the management MUST have known that. They do that for a living, okay?

And the sad thing was: who would give a dime even they knew what's going on? If you're pocketing astronomical bonuses that're more than enough for you to retire at 40 and live a easy life later on, why would you care that you're killing Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, etc?

"In addition to our bonuses, the stupid government will utilize all means to save our ass should we run into troubles since we're 'too big to fail'."

Talk about AIG.

Yeah the boards of directors should have had the incentives to care. After all, they're supposed to have substantial amount of stock of the banks. No matter how much dividend they got in those few booming years, I don't see how it's worth it to have all their stock flushed down the toilet later on. Well, the only reason I can think of is that they were all fooled by their CXO's (X = E, F, O, etc).

"We've increased our income by 20% this year!" said the CEO.

"You've done a good job! Let's give him 20% increase in bonus!" cheered the board of ~~morons~~ directors.

Anyways, how about the government?

Banks are no regular businesses in at least two ways:

they've a huge number of small debtees (aka depositors)
the money they borrow (the deposits) are backed by FDIC

The first characteristic makes it a disaster when banks fail because it affect so many people. A large number of people seeing their money gone is much worse than a few rich guys losing their investment since the former can cause widespread panic.

Because of this, the government created FDIC to insure the depositors' money. This is a good thing, but it also creates the "government-will-save-our-ass" problem. If the banks aren't regulated, they'll make very risky bets:

"Hey, the money is backed by the government anyways so let's make this bet. If we win, we'll be rich. If we lose, worst case is that we got fired, no big deal."

And the banks weren't regulated at all when they were creating the biggest housing bubble in history. Did Alan Greenspan notice the bubble? Of course he did, everyone did. Did he or the government do anything to stop it from growing? To the best of my knowledge, not that much or even none.

I don't have enough knowledge in economics (heck, I've never taken any economics class) to judge how well his free market ideology works. That being said, there're some regulations that make perfect sense to even to a layman like me. How about these rules?

Do not lend money to borrowers who've no proof of income.
Do not lend money to borrowers who've very bad or zero credit.
Do not let borrowers make 0% down payment despite the lucrative high interest rate.
Do not make ARMs to borrowers who've no hope of making payments when the interest rises after a few years.
And so on.

Or, maybe the above rules already exist? If that's the case, the banks were clearly violating those rules and, surprisingly, no one is being punished now (at least I've not heard of any banker being sued or put to jail or at least pay a fine).

Using any kind of reasonable measure, the Bush administration was a failure. Bill Clinton might have initiated the bubble back in the 90's but Bush had plenty of time (8 years) to at least make the bubble burst more gracefully.

I hope that the Obama administration will reform the rules that govern the banks so as to stop these irresponsible lending practices from emerging again. Remember, to own a home is the American Dream, but there's no shame whatsoever to rent. If you can't afford to buy, just don't buy. This is one message that I really hope that the government can spread to the general public (preferably from Obama's mouth).

Beside having a more capable government, another long term solution is to educate the our next generation to have better values:

Instead of judging people's success by how much money they make, judge them by what they do to the country, to the world, to humanity.

There's no way to construct a perfect legal system with no hole at all that can be exploited by the malicious to get rich. However, if we have values like the one I propose above, a low-income janitor will be considered far superior than a wealthy investment banker who uses his smarts to invent securities that no one can understand and sell them to the ignorant elderly (Lehman mini-bonds in Hong Kong anyone?). When people have right values, they'll tend to do the right things.

To the bankers who caused this world disaster for the sake of their commissions/bonus/whatever: how do you think the history will judge you?

That's Why You Go Away - Michael Learns To Rock

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:27:00 +0000

I guess no people from Hong Kong doesn't know this song? Excellent song from MLTR but I don't really like the black and white MTV...It's kind of weird (~__~ )

"I don't believe in too hard"

alex@alexweblog.com (Alex) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 07:29:00 +0000

In Bill Gates' video about malaria and education, he told people that he is "an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved". This made me think of Professor Randy Pausch's testimony to the members the Congress before he died:

In the testimony, he said

"I don't believe in too hard."

He believed that if enough funding is allocated for pancreatic cancer research, we should be able to raise the survival rate to a much higher one like breast cancer's.

True that there're probably some problems in this world that just cannot be solved. Despite that, I believe everyone should hold an attitude like Gates' and Randy's toward life.

It's this kind of optimism that drives the human civilization forward. It's this kind of belief that took us to the moon. It's this kind of faith that gives us hope so that we believe we can make tomorrow a better day.

Because of this, whenever I encounter a difficult problem, I usually say this to myself

"You think this is tough? There're many tougher problems in this world and some brave people are ruthlessly working on them. Don't be kidding me :P"