Geopolitics: It is all business now

What happened? I thought the Philippines consider China a bully and adversary to the point that she has tried to haul her to the UN's court. We were even afraid they might fire on each other at sea.

Strategists who had tried to use the tools they are familiar with to understand the present geopolitics could not make any progress. I think everything is clearer if we appreciate how priorities have changed. Time will make it increasingly clear that the business of geopolitics is neither geography nor politics but business. It is all about getting rich now. Nobody except the North Koreans and Islamic terrorists want to go to war if there is a buck to be made. In fact I think the North Koreans have decided they want to be rich as well but they have to go about it more carefully.

The big loser in this game could be Russia which has chosen to act against its own economic interests but that is another story.

Update: 4:50pm

Francis Fukuyama is a creative thinker. Earlier I had read Khong Yuen Fong from the LKYSPP in the ST today. What a contrast. Khong was basically spouting LKY ideas but Fukuyama is a far more interesting read. I think Fukuyama will if not already also think the business of geopolitics is mostly business now. This is easy because China has the power of initiative and has chosen the business path into the world and also tomorrow. After all the wise always leverage their strengths and that would be business for the Chinese. Afterward they can grow strong in other aspects of power. By then geopolitics will revert to its familiar historical norms.

MOE: From problem solving to creating value

The minister asserted that our students are good at solving problems, i.e,. leading to adding value but not so good at creating value. He suggested e.g., Olivia Lum of Hyflux as an example to emulate. I think most parents would just let this message into one ear and out the other ear. Words not backed by concrete action is emptiness.

Do we feel safe to fail? Yes, when I take a digital photo it often completely safe to fail because the cost is zero almost all the time. The helpful approach is not to ask if it is safe to fail or even afford the cost of failure. It is if we do not succeed is it worth keep trying until we do. To me most readers understand it completely differently.

It would have been much more helpful for Ng Chee Meng to say we want to create a system whereby it is not too costly to fail because there are avenues to make a come back. In fact our system today already allow that. This new minister has to learn to communicate better and he is learning it by trying and failing. LOL!

When we commit ourselves to creating value the path to success is not yet built. Nobody yet knows how to do that and we have to figure it out. Exploring and building those paths entail risk taking and learning from failure. I think most people have yet to grasp this point. We will have to teach pupils a new set of values and attitudes to help them create value. Presently most people don't even think about creating value at all. So I am asking where are the programs to equip pupils with the skills to create value?

Replaced storage tank water heater

On October 27, 2010 I ordered over the phone an Ariston storage tank water heater. I can't remember if that was my second or third one, most likely the third. I don't know what gave me the idea they are located in the Upper Bukit Timah area because Kian Teck Crescent is in Jurong.

Slightly more than five years have passed and the Ariston started to leak visibly yesterday. So I got on the phone to repeat what I had one five years back. I wanted to replace the Ariston but Casa no longer carries them. I accepted the Rubine instead after finding it difficult to reach Ariston.

I suppose I will have to call them again in 2020 to replace my heater eh? But would I still be living here by then? Who knows.

Come to think of it, I also bought by mutli-split aircon over the phone as well. May be next time I will buy them online.

Oh Hard Data!

I am wasting my Economist subscription which I will not renew when it comes due next year. Occasionally they send some interesting stuff to my inbox. This is a subject I am relatively familiar with.

Going to church is a poor proxy for personal faith. It measures piety more than anything else when you discover time and again how adherents of any major religion know so little about their scriptures much less practice them. My point? I am not writing about religion in this post. I am just reminding myself how useful or lacking that hard data is. Policy makers elevate the importance of hard data without sufficient regard to what the data is and where it is from and especially how it is collected.

Data mining today is mostly about applying math to hard data. It will not stop at that but move beyond to verbal data eventually. Making sense of our environment and the world is still an art which requires open, curious and skeptical minds. The politics of committees and correctness inevitably lean us one way or the other leading to costly mistakes when hard data is plentiful. So I think government agencies with plenty of hard data are more at risk of making mistakes than those without it especially MFA. In the absence of hard data they bring to the task a sense of realism which they keep refining to get more real all the time. Just as Science is the basis for Engineering, Foreign Policy is the basis for our survival and will override the many wrong conclusions from hard data. It might have saved us many times without us being aware. Just look at the track record of those nations where foreign policy is a luxury. These are usually the big powers which try to dictate their policies to other states. They often have numerous pockets with low quality of life despite their country wealth and power because they do stupid things using hard data and special interests as the invisible guiding hand.

That map from the Economist might be intriguing but it is not very useful for anything else except satisfying curiosity.

Update: 8:10am

The next article in that email from the Economist. Niamey the new data driven result center of Christianity is in Africa. So the next story must be one from that continent right? That is being correct isn't it?

See the pic, full of piety but I rather these Christians imbibe the values and life of Jesus of the Gospels instead. Narrow piety eventually becomes exclusive and at some point end up as clashes with those who are not like you. Modern Islam has gone down this road farther than any.

In the next year as when we first come to rely so much on computers, data will be used to make us stupid because dumb people who cannot or are too lazy to think will let the data speak for themselves. Well at least economists have learned to avoid this trap because they have been wrong so regularly. Keep trying and do develop the convictions to use only one hand. I think economists mostly do not read the Economist eh?

Miss Universe: The Litmus Test

Only about six million live viewers for the finals of the Miss Universe pageant in Las Vegas. I mentioned the location to point out that it was really convenient for North and South American viewers to catch this and it seemed they weren't very keen.

I used to look out for our own Miss Singapore among them but have lost interest and stopped that for I can't remember how long.

After a while we all gave up and view this as mostly a flesh parade with a PLUS or plus. It eventually dawned on us that it was just a small plus. Well Steve Harvey inadvertently offered the world audience the litmus test of what these most beautiful women are made of. Not much and what you see will not last very long unless they put in herculean effort to keep looking good. Even so it is fading glory and every year there are new beauties. So this is just a passport to wealth.

My friend's daughter was Miss Indiana before and today she doesn't want to be reminded of her achievement. Instead she prefers to be known as a successful pharmacist. Her mother told me the experience was eye opening especially the competitiveness, the effort and cheating that went into trying to win. In the end the more attractive girls are the ones who didn't win because they went to make friends as their top priority. Like our Lisa Marie White.

 Possibly many of these former beauty queens remain superficial all their lives. Imelda Marcos was a beauty queen and she was much worse than superficial.

Look Miss Philippines and Universe 1969 and 1973, that was so long ago I was too young to understand, must be senior citizens now, check out their bad attitude.

The newly crowned Miss Universe should have shared the moment with Miss Columbia to save her the embarrassment. That would have made her truly special but of course I am asking the impossible. All these girls are so focused on themselves. Any charity is done to make themselves look good. But for how long? Meanwhile the world has become wiser and look elsewhere. In my lifetime I will see the end of these silly beauty contests. They should stop the ones for babies and animals too. Just compete with growing the best vegetables.

Update: Jan 1 7:00pm

This yahoo story makes it easy for me to say that there are jobs and roles we take on that come with losing our identities. A beauty queen represents her country but she doesn't have the experience and savvy of an ambassador. Unless she is carefully choreographed things are likely to go wrong given their youth and inexperienced.

If what had happened was bad, it could have been much worse and there was only one way to make it better bearing in mind that countries must not lose face.

Found Old Street BKT at ARC

Had lunch today at Astons in MBC. We crossed over next door at ARC to do some groceries shopping at Fairprice and saw that Old Street Bak Kut Teh has replaced RSH. Just as well since we will lose the outlet at Funan Centre, we could come here instead.

Not true that Brunei banned Christmas celebrations

I was waiting to see if it was really true that Brunei had banned public celebration of Christmas because I didn't believe the report from AFP. So it was untrue then as Today just reported.

It is very simple. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Because the ang moh media had on a few occasions already write up Islam related stories with their growing prejudice against Islam, they have slanted many of their stories to fit their beliefs. As Brunei have implemented sharia laws, to them curtailing Christmas celebration is a logical next step. They never do their homework about sharia. Don't we also regularly read how they mis-report many countries in Asia especially China? Even the Economist is often wrong about Singapore because instead of letting all the facts form a picture to tell the story, they regularly cherry picked what they want to fit their ideological framework. With that year after year they prescribe all the wrong policies for us, and they never learned that they were wrong every time.