Habit

I have read many articles which criticize people for sticking to their habits every day without deviation. Yesterday I read one such article. It talked about a diamond shop which tried to promote its merchandise by sending letters to its old customers, with sample of real diamonds inside. Unfortunately all its old customers saw the letters as junk mail so they got tossed into the bin without even being opened. The conclusion was that sticking to habit causes us to miss many valuable things in life.

However, let's look at the flip side of things. What if after hearing of this story, everyone became determined not to miss anything in life due to habit? The first step would be to open and read every piece of junk mail. This would certainly take up a lot of time that could be used for work or relaxation.

Not only that, everyone would have to open and read all the junk emails just in case one of them was actually a good promotion. Never mind the viruses and the Nigerian emails, there might be an opportunity there!

Obviously this is not viable. Too much time would be wasted in total to be worth it even if a diamond comes in the mail once in twenty years, which I doubt.

We follow our habits in daily life because they save us time. Time is money. Spending time every day on a very low-percentage possibility is simply not sensible. Say we would need 20 minutes every day to check through junk mails and junk emails. That would come up to 7300 minutes a year, or 121 hours, or 15 work-days. Clearly spending so much time on something so unlikely is ridiculous.

I'm not going to buy lottery tickets because the percentages are not worth it. Same with other things.

Why Malaysians dislike reading

There was some newspaper article which stated that Malaysians had a pretty low reading rate compared to citizens of other countries. I have not done any survey on this, but when I look at profiles on Facebook, I do tend to see the "books I like" field either blank or bearing the words "I hate books".

So why do we, as a people, dislike books so?

When I was a kid, my dad was bringing me around. I brought a storybook with me to entertain myself. Upon seeing that I was (shock and horror!) reading, one of my dad's friends remarked to him "Wow your son is really hardworking!". So that might be a reason why we dislike reading; we associate it with schoolwork and study and exams and low marks and parents shouting at us for the low marks.

But then, I'm sure kids in countries like Japan and Korea get pushed hard in their studies too, probably harder than us. Yet they read more. Japan was shown to have one of the highest rates of reading in the world, and their authors are paid like rock stars.

Perhaps then a reason why we read less is because we have to learn multiple languages. A local Chinese has to learn at the very least Malay and English, and quite likely Mandarin too, and maybe some dialects such as Cantonese and Hokkien. Learning too many languages might mean that we master none, therefore have little deep interest in any. Hence our disinterest in literature.

So in the end, I'm not sure whether our vaunted capacity to converse in many languages is truly a blessing or not, as many of us never reach mastery in any of them.

What's the best degree?

The best degree is in something that you love to do, be it quantum physics or Middle Eastern dance or plain old business administration. Having said that, if you like a few things but can't decide what to do, or you don't really feel strongly towards anything, then we need to objectively study which degree is "the best".

When I chose my degree, I chose Finance. This was because I was not sure what I wanted to do. I felt a Finance degree could help me get my foot in the door for a decently wide variety of jobs, or serve me if I were to set up business on my own or invest. Also because I was lazy and a science degree seemed like a ton of work.

Among the business degrees, I actually think an Accounting degree is best. This is based on what I call the "Theory of replaceability". That is, an Accounting grad can get any other business-type job, but Marketing/Management etc cannot get Accounting jobs. Finance is somewhat weaker than Accounting in this respect, however it somewhat makes up for it by sounding cool in an investment-bankish way.

Based on this theory, an Engineering/Computer Science degree would be even better, as they can do science jobs and most business jobs too, except hard-core accounting.

The trouble with those degrees is a ton of people get pushed towards them for prestige and career reasons, even people who are really not interested or not cut out for them. These people then end up having low CGPA's and find it hard to get a good job. The thing is, although I do feel a 2.5 in engineering is equal to a 3 or more in business in terms of equivalent difficulty, HR people do not see it that way (probably because very few of them have science degrees).

In short, my feeling towards each degree is like this:

Pure Sciences (Chem/Physics/Bio/Math) - Don't expect to get a job in your field in Malaysia and you will be okay.
Engineering/Computer Science - Wonderful, but if you hate it don't force yourself.
Business - Okay, try to take something more quantitative such as Accounting/Finance/Economics.
Lawyer/Doctor - If you are willing to have not much life you will earn a ton.
Arts - If you do it do it because you love it not because you think it's an easy degree.

Anyway, we can't judge a person's future from what major they take. Remember, Kate Middleton took Art History, and look where she is now!

Shallowness

I have often heard girls claiming that guys are shallower in choosing a mate. "You all just want the hot girls" they say.

I do agree that physical attractiveness does play a significant role when guys look for a partner. However I think the same applies for girls. I've seen many girls go "oh I care about heart not about looks" in public, then quietly tell me that they want a cute/hot guy when I offer to introduce guys to them. The smart thing girls do is that when they choose based on looks, they say it's based on "feel", while when guys choose based on looks they just say it's based on looks. So girls have better PR skills, which doesn't surprise me somehow.

But for argument's sake lets admit that guys care more about looks than girls.

Is this necessarily more shallow?

Let's analyze the situation. If girls attach less weight to the "looks" factor, they will necessarily attach more weight to other factors, such as personality, career, intelligence, etc. What are the implications of these factors?

Personality - girls want a guy with a strong character so he can protect her/their children better.
- girls want a guy with a caring character so he can care for her/their children better.

Career - more money can provide for her/their children better.

Intelligence - smarter = better career (generally speaking), see above point.

So we can see that these factors all ultimately benefit the girl and her immediate children.

On the other hand, how about looks? Statistics show that good looks benefit one in terms of likability, income, success, political career and even the ability to escape conviction in front of a jury. So if you look at it this way, one who wants an attractive mate is considering the long-term welfare of his or her children. More than that, it serves to bolster the long-term genetic potential of all his or her future descendants.

So if we look at this way, hotness is actually a less shallow criteria than personality or career as it confers the most benefits in the long run, measured over generations.

Primitivity

I once went on a class trip to visit a native village near the city I stay in. After we had gave a few gifts to the village elders and finished exchanging pleasantries, a friend and I started chatting with a native teenage boy.

My friend asked him: "So what do you do in your free time?" He answered "Playstation 2". After all of us had finished laughing, we began chatting about the games we played.

I bet some people would be disappointed at hearing that; they would probably hope that he would say his favorite pastime was kicking a rattan ball or hunting wild animals with a blowpipe. "More authentic" they say. We can observe this tendency to feel that it's better to keep the old ways from the laments we see in comments to magazine articles which feature native tribes in Africa or South America which are modernizing.

Now, if you asked those people who didn't like this trend of modernization to live without electricity or catch their own dinner, I bet they wouldn't be too fond of it. So why should we expect natives to like it too? Just because they are used to it? I am used to being stuck in traffic too, but if someone were to offer me a way to avoid the jam and get to work, I'd jump at the chance.

Same thing with natives and modern amenities. Why would you want to do things the hard way?

What if Facebook started charging money

I always see these stupid spam letters on Facebook about how Facebook is about to start charging money and if 50 million people stand up against it Mark Zuckerberg will back down. Barring the sheer stupidity of such spam letters, I wonder what would happen if Mark really did start charging some cold hard cash for the privilege of poking our friends, talking about ourselves 24-7 and stalking hot members of the opposite sex.

How much could he charge? RM100 a month? No way, I would switch back to Friendster. RM 1? Yes I would pay Rm 1 a month to use it. RM 10? That's a good question.

Mark would have to find the best price to maximize revenue obtained. Trouble is a large section of people using Facebook nowadays are kids, and the hassle of getting a credit card to pay for it online might stop them. They would switch to Friendster maybe. This would not be good for business.

Maybe what he could do is to sell a voucher containing a certain amount of value. The value might get you an hour on Facebook, or maybe a certain number of actions such as a thousand words for comments/messages. I'm not sure how that would translate into Facebook games though.

If he does it, I sure hope he charges by word. Then I would have to endure much less updates such as "I'm waiting for the bus now" on my wall.

The trouble with modern economies (1)

Say you have a family. Everyone pitches in to do housework. Mom cooks and does dishes, Dad does the heavy work, and the two kids clean the house up. Maybe everyone spends a couple hours a day on doing housework.

As the family finances improve, they buy more and more machines to help them do the work. Mixers and dishwashers help Mom to finish her work fast, a lawnmower helps Dad, while an automatic vacuum cleaner helps the kids. So everyone cuts their work down to one hour a day. Sounds good right?

Unfortunately in the real world when machines increase productivity, we don't get a reduction in work hours. What happens is some people get laid off. The remaining people have to work just as hard. Either that, or they get shifted to do new things.

I used to do consulting work for a large beer company. The factory itself was really empty; there were only a few workers walking around checking instruments and operating the machines, which were mostly automated anyway. There were far more people in the office upstairs doing various kinds of paperwork, such as increasingly fine analysis of accounts and operations, as well as increased marketing efforts.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have to increase all this paperwork? I really don't see what benefit it brings our society. Yet it wouldn't be a good idea for a company to go "screw it, we don't need to get our people to do this elaborate marketing campaigns", as they might lose market share to companies that did get people to do elaborate marketing campaigns. The sad truth of competition is preventing all of us from reducing our work hours to 6 hours a day due to modern technology.