Yan_and_himself's Xanga

leaving Xanga

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:03:05 GMT

I have finally taken the decision to leave Xanga, and set up a new blog at blogger

I'm finding Xanga increasingly cluttered with stuff, and the site is loading really slowly. also it is a shame that I cannot use the post by email feature.
I imagine that other people are still loving xanga, it's just my fondness of simplicity that leads me to leave.
big thanks to the whole xanga team for my almost 7 years of writing here! I'm sure I'll come back to visit eery now and again to see what I have written over the years:)

what would the jury say

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:58:09 GMT

so one more has been accused in London of "stepping over the line between freedom of speech and insiting violence."
one of his crimes was to raise funds publically for insurgents in Iraq. and of course, he is a supporter of Jihad against America (which is said to be a crime as well).
I wonder what the jury will say if they were to try the many jews who helped raising funds, went to fight, seeked supplies of high-tech weapons from America in and before 1949 when Israel established her country by occupying lands that belonged to others? what will the jury also say about presidents and prime ministers, who publically rally support for war, who doesn't need to raise funds for killing because they have control over how much is spent on war and they do spend a lot, who, instead of "fighting with the only weapon he has, which is his tongue" fight with numerous leathal weapons?
what will the jury say about my comments too?

EASTERN CONGO

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:30:23 GMT

THERE WAS A VERY DISTURBING REPORT ON RADIO 4 THIS MORNING BEING BROADCASTED when I was having breakfast.
a woman and her whole family, children and everyone, were dragged out of their village by some soldiers. all the men who was related to the woman were killed with a bayonette sliced through their body. then the soldiers tied a rope round her baby's neck, the woman was made to pull the rope to strangle the baby. 19 soldiers raped the woman, and the woman and one of her daughters are the only survivers. the woman told the interviewer that she kept telling the child that all her brothers and sisters and relatives have died, and her mother has knd of died already too...
at this point I was just thinking, what should be done to these soldiers!! I'd torture them, I would kill them in the slowest of all ways, I would make them suffer as much as possible, I would make them pay for the crimes, the barbaric acts, not worthy of being called humans thinking and actions that they comitted.
I went on to think, that prison really may not be the most suitable punnishment for all crimes. punnishing people with imprisonment is perhaps enough most of the time, but punnishing conscious wolves, lions, thinking tigers, cats that understand what other animals and people are thinking and feeling, I think doing to them what they have done to others is a much better way of punnishing them.
the interview went on. the woman was asked what she would like to be done with the soldiers, she simply said..."get them out of the country."
interviewer: dont you want to see them killed
woman: no...

chinese government - wake up!

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:19:56 GMT

why is the Chinese government so stupid!
if the Americans can think of terms like non-compatible something combatants (can't even remember the stupid word), to replace prisoners of war so as to avoid responsibilities, and self-assisted something killing to replace suicide so as to erase all records of attempted suicide in guantanamo bay, and something something eatting to replace force-feeding so as to say that no force-feeding goes on at all so that the bastards can claim that they are humane...... why can't the Chinese government be a bit more inventive and come up with some words to describe the situation in such a way that the government is noble and kind etc?

I'm being sarcastic of course, basic human rights everywhere is important including the leading nations (yes, that's what everywhere means, every single place, no exclusion, some nations don't understand that surprisingly).

nastiness

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:17:37 GMT

of all the nasty things that humans are capable of, and have been doing, slavery and selling girls for prostitution really are the two that make me most angry. I remember reading the totilas curtain (which I wrote about a long time ago, not really about slavery but...), and testimonies from slaves on how they were treated and sold and bought, the same kind of anger rose in me. now I'm reading the memoirs of a gaisha, and I have the same feeling.
I have seen and read lots of horrible things that humans have done, torturing - in order to make someone admit something, or just torture because one wants others to suffer... war - killingss, shootings, bombing, kill just because one is of a different race/religion, rape just because one is a woman whom one's leader said is one's enemy... gas chambers, so-called medical experiment,... all of these show a lot of human nature - cruel, obidient without own judgement, animal-like (after all we are animals), disgusting, horrible, nasty, self-protective to the point of erasing others of different race or have different believes... but none of these gives me the same kind of feeling as when I read about selling and buying people to be slaves or prostitutes. these two are just everything nasty combined and the sum is greater than the parts.

business

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:25:20 GMT

I'll begin this post by offending a lot of people, but please forgive me and it is not my intention to do so, I just want to share my somewhat sad observation with you.
If one wants to be successful in business, and being successful in business means making lots of money, what one should do is to do a tiny bit of market research, look in the mirror, put make-up and perfume on, then offer to fuck anyone with a price. "unfortunately" this is illegal in most places, so one of the most successful ways of being successful in business has become meaning being able to capitalise on sex in some indirect ways. for example, by first projecting the idea that showing one's breasts is cool, then sell clothes that match that goal. or, by first projecting the idea that sleeping around (being a free prostitute in effect)means being what a contemporary teenager should do, then open night clubs and have free ladies night etc to match the means to achieving the idea. as a side note, I should remind you that if one is a prostitute, one gets (in theory) the money one earns, but in the examples, it is the business people who make the money since they manage to manipulate others and capitalise on their willingness to be free prostitute, either to the eyes or not.

back to the agenda. I deliberately chose a offensive, morally chalenging example because I want to point out the fact that the premise, that business is simplyto make as much money as possible, is wrong. business has becomethe biggest factor that affect our lives, more than absolutely anything else. business guides government decisions, in what ways can people live, even religion is comercialised.

business therefore has to be responsible for social issues. it cannot just exploit every desire/lust that men and women have regardless of whether those desires are morally right or wrong. business people have the responsibility to help shape our moral values, or to have the right desire. cigarettes surely can make a lot of money, because they are addictive. drugs as well. but they are harmful to us and no business should capitalise on our desire (forced) to keep the addiction. similarly for obesity, long working hours that damage our long term health (much less obvious which is why it hasnt been addressed properly).
(continued next time)

division of labour

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:23:02 GMT

I have been working for quite a long while now, well 3 months and a bit. Overall, for me, I think working is generally fun. At the same time i can see that for a lot of people, working can be horribly dull, and it is purely the means to get money, nothing more than that.

Compare a company with the human body. the human body is highly committed to division of labour - the different organs obviously. The brain is like the manager, who has control over all aspects of the body. then there are the front line staff, like the arms, the legs etc. and there are the back office staff like the kidney, the liver, the heart etc. and of course those who are kind of between back office and front line or both, which are the senses who constantly monitor the business and give feedback to the manager.

which job role one wishes to do depends on one's personality. Some prefer to see the different faces everyday, talk to the guests, learn a few things from people all over the world everyday. some prefer to be the brain, and some like to observe. but can you imagine, who on earth wants to be the kidney or the heart or the liver? They have no control over what they do, who they see, how to do things, and the job is highly repetitive with hardly any chance of getting a nice surprise. The kidneys simply process whatever that go to them.

it is easy to see what kind of jobs fall into the kidney category - simply those jobs that can be done via the internet. that is, reservations, potentially reservations for conferences as well, and those jobs that can be done by robots - such as housekeeping.

how can a company make these people happy then? well these people do these jobs because of money most of the time, so by paying them more they will be happy. but these jobs are the easiest of all, require least skills (never listen to the management's argument that performing those repetitive tasks is hard! the tasks are important but no where near hard.) so they are also the least well-paid jobs.
as a result, they are the people who are most unsatisfied and least happy about their job comparatively.
the only way to regain job satisfaction is really to have as little division of labour as possible, so that the kidney can have a glimse of what is going on outside the body, and the stomache can taste what the mouth is enjoying.

Working life

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 22:02:08 GMT

It's been more than two months since I last wrote anything. If I have time I shall write a little more frequently now since life is more eventful. Well it's not true that life was not eventful in the last two months, I'll jot down the highlights at the end if I feel like it.
I was trying to decide whether to make the title pesimistically as "leaving student years", or more possitively as "Entering working life." I guess it's obvious what I have chosen in the end:)
So, I'm now working with Hilton hotels. My role is to learn as much as I can in the shortest amount of time, in the hope that I can get to a general manager position in ten years. There is a burning question which I have to address properly here, which I did not actually do for the interview because firstly, the answer is too long-winded, secondly, I did not really know the answer fully at the time I have to admit. The question is this: Why on earth would I go into the hotel industry after graduating from Physics and Philosophy?
I think Ana and I have this question a lot since Ana did Politics and History which is also rather irelevant to the hotel industry.
There are two parts of hotel as far as I can see, one is the nice bit, which is to make people happy by letting them stay in a place. The other is dirty, which is to make as much money from the people who stay as possible. I love maths, I love game theory, so that's the dirty bit explained. The other half is much more complex. I do not actually think that there is any direct relationship between philosophy or politics or history and the making people happy part of the hotel. At the end of the day, we make people happy only because we want them to come again and give us more money, so that has to be included in the "games" we play with the customers, which in turn should go under a subheading of game theory somewhere. What these subjects do however is acting as the means to understanding why people want to come again and again to not actually the same place, but the same hotel with the same ceo. So there's trust (that the CEO dilivers the same standard across all his properties), security (that a person will not feel that he is going into new teritory), laziness (that a person may not be extremely happy but merely satisfied with the service, but he is nonetheless not willing to take a risk to try other hotels), etc etc. This is perhaps what philosophy and all that can do. My conclusion is that someone who does psychology and maths/economics is best in hotel jobs. so I'm a bit off but I have reasons to like the industry.

10 years

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 12:37:23 GMT

It's been 10 years since Hong Kong was handed back to China.
There has been a lot of celebrations, many shops are offering fantastic discounts, there's firework display, lots and lots of performances in amost all shopping malls etc etc. But who exactly are celebrating?
Since 1997 every single big headline is negative, some are arguably unavoidable disasters (stockmarket colapsing, various kind of diseases), some are unarguably man made disasters (education reform, restriction of freedom of speech, of research, gangsters rule to the point of lawlessness etc), and the rest are mishandling of natural disasters, hence turning them into man made disasters.
So who are celebrating? Not the students in Hong Kong who understand what brought about the change they have to endure, not the teachers who know what brought about the education reform, not the headmasters who have reform their school because of reform of education, not doctors due to recent rediculous events, not those who embrace freedom of speech, not those who want to be honest about what they have gathered from their research, nor those who do not want to be locked up because of their criticisms...... who's left?
A lot of people are still celebrating! These are the people, generally speaking, who have not suffered in the last ten years. They are the young ones who do not understand, the teenagers who ought to understand but do not understand, the adults who need to understand but DO NOT understand, and the majority is those people who have been "imported" from China. To those who have been imported from China there is every reason to celebrate, since objectively speaking, Hong Kong was, at least at the beginning of the ten years, an awful lot more modern and easy to survive in than in China.
What do all these mean in terms of real politics? well I have realised that there is something to be learnt here. Democracy is, put it very simply, the majority rules. if an election for the chief of Hong Kong took place at a time where 1 out of 12 people in Hong Kong was disturbed enough to go marching on Hong Kong national day, the elected would not be one that China likes to be sure. Now lots of people are from China, some local Hong Kong people have been brainwashed, etc etc, the voting would be expected to be very different. What seems to be going downhill in a Hong Kong's person's eyes would still be seen as great in the mainlander's eyes, hence they would have no grievances towards the current government, nor would they bother to try to pick which government is best since firstly, they do not have the concept of democracy, secondly they do not feel that these things affect them since they are happy already.
Now what this means is that China does not strictly have to totally ban democracy forever, all China has to do is to postpone the decision as to when to let Hong Kong people have the right to choose what government it has, until a time when the fresh water reservoir is just more than half-filled with sea water. From what I can see, now is not the right time yet, but it's getting there very soon. We will have democracy, officially and generously given to HongKong by China, but still, the elected will be naturally chosen to be someone who is controlled by China. This is one pitfall of democracy, and China is using it very well.

lovely song

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 04:37:26 GMT

I really like this song, the only thing is that it stops short.
enjoy! (it should be playing when you are visiting my site)