Bow ties

I may have to start wearing bow ties way more often in the future, if only for the fact that it's incredibly good looking to lounge around with an untied bow tie around your neck and a bit of whisky in your glass.

And on an unrelated note, Gounod's interpretation of Goethe's Faust, as performed by the Finnish National Opera, was somewhat of a let down. I was expecting the devil to be a bit more sinister.

"I could talk about that, but I won't..."

The sheer energy of the guy is amazing... Both inspiring and funny...

On taxation

The tax debate is in full swing in Finland again, this time regarding capital income and how it should be taxed progressively. It seems to me that progression is the trendy word these days, so I'm going to leap-frog myself over it and discover the next big trend around the corner: regression. What I propose is simple: regressive taxation. The more you earn, the more you pay taxes in absolute sense. But in relative sense your tax rate should decrease as a function of your income (be it salary or capital based).

But, this is still merely a stop-gap on our way to the ultimate goal: regressive taxation where relative taxes decrease so as to ensure that everyone pays an equal amount (in an absolute sense) of taxes, regardless of income levels. This would naturally be the ultimate fair and reasonable solution! Everyone would finally be equal, regardless of race, gender, wealth, and so on... ;)

Research questions

One of the biggest challenges so far is nothing new to anyone who has ever written academic papers: how to define what it is exactly that you want to do and how to scope it? This often manifests itself as the difficult of defining a good research question. By instinct I would say that the difficulty is in trying to define a set of questions which are not only interesting, but also solvable while not being entirely naive. There may be more aspects as well, but those came to mind right away.

Regardless, the broad strokes of my thesis have been more or less clear for a while:

1. I want to look at two industries (automobile and ICT).
2. I want to use the industry evolution viewpoint and systems thinking (more specifically system dynamics) to hit stuff with.

What then happened was that I decided to more or less climb up a tree arse first, as I typically do. So I figured that maybe these two industries have links between each other, which could be manifested in various ways (e.g. by the emergence of ICT stuff in your everyday cars). Building off of this, I got excited and decided that obviously I could find some smaller subindustries from beneath the two and argue that they are moving towards each other, in which case my core idea would be to speculate on a collision test: how do two industries (or subindustries in this case) collide, what are the aspects related to something like this, and what does theory say about industry convergence or industry formation.

When I woke up this morning I decided that maybe I'm going at it the wrong way. Getting anything empirical from the above would possibly prove rather tricky. So I had another Idea, despite the fact that more intelligent people than I have said that when writing a thesis, if you get any type of idea you should immediately kill it as MSc theses are no places for ideas. I know these people to be true, but come on, I have an Idea and I trust myself implicitly!

So, maybe my problem is that I'm making too many assumptions about what might be happening. How the hell could I know what exactly is going on between two massive industries when I haven't even talked to any of the companies directly and tried to get an idea of what is actually happening. But one thing is certain: companies in these two industries are talking. Can't deny that. But will it result in industry convergence or industry formation? Perhaps not, as both are large, well established industries themselves. So maybe there isn't any collision to look at per se. But there are obviously cross-industry interactions going on in the form of companies talking with each other, doing products which interface increasingly with each other, participating in the same industry discussion platforms, talking with the same regulators, and so on.

Now, maybe a more dialed down version of an approach could be as follows:

• What are the mechanisms for companies to interact (e.g. collaborate) across different industries?
• How do cross-industry interactions shape the evolution of an industry? And vice versa?
• What is (and has been) happening with the automobile and ICT industries: what does theory say, what does practice say?

This set of questions seems, from my point of view, to be a lot less assuming than the original approach. They're also slightly more boring, and I've yet to figure out what exactly the really cool thing would be. But herein lies another point that I often overlook: maybe my thesis doesn't in fact need to create any type of radical new insight, maybe it's enough that I just apply the scientific method and solve at least the questions above. Getting empirical material for the above questions should be too difficult, so in this regard it also seems doable.

Finally, let me conclude by saying that most of the thinking I was doing while I was writing. And I spent about 15 minutes performing the act of writing. So I reserve the right to decide to revamp the approach at least three more times by lunch, and continue at that pace for as long as I see fit. But hey, it's better to have these types of mood swings at this point of the process, as opposed to the end of the process (I have experience about that as well: I ended up writing my BSc thesis three times during which I slightly evolved my viewpoint during every iteration: I can't suggest that approach too much...).

Breaking ground

Starting in January I had my first discussions regarding my upcoming thesis, and things seem to be progressing, despite a slightly slow pace as of yet. Anyway, I finally today broke ground by actually starting build a map of the relevant literature and authors in Excel. Reflecting back on my many learning experiences from my BSc thesis, I guess the best thing to do is to be smart about things; instead of randomly running into papers and reading everything that comes up, my strategy this time around in regards to literature can be summarized something like this:

1. Build the main corpus starting from a set of literature from one or two relevant courses from school. Break the articles down and do a simple analysis of references to attept to identify the key authors and potentially their key papers. In my case the literature will be primarily based on the field of industry evolution.
2. Since my specific topic is related to a topic which the bulk of industry evolution papers don't appear to touch directly, I'll have to most likely venture out into the periphery of literature to see if anything's present there. The tactic here will be to formulate some keywords and guestimates. Bonus points for articles which cite Utterback, Hannan, Klepper, Frenken, Abernathy, Carroll, etc.
3. The Big Books of systems thinking and dynamics. No direct link to the subject at hand from these books, except for potentially providing me a nifty hammer with which I can then hit everything with.

My hope is that by spending a bit time on actually analyzing the literature before jumping in will result in brownie points from school for finding the truly relevant articles as well as enabling me to actually read a lot less than I otherwise would. Also, a map is always a cool thing since you are less likely to get lost if you have one (although it's still nothing compared to the nifty Ovi navigation stuff that Nokia recently decided to start giving out free... Yeah, I know, this was a really cheap plug, but oh well...).

But, from now on I'll try to blog every once in a while about the progress of my thesis. Let's see if I can actually graudate by the end of the year...

What's for dinner?

Had a decently nice dinner last week to mourn over a steadily accelerating decline (or is it still a steadily declining ascent?) that nature has imposed on all of us. The menu consisted of:

• Lobster seasoned with rosemary and cold smoked salmon-sweet potato crème
• Fried scallop with champagne risotto
• Ox tail and sauerkraut
• Fillet of hare, Jerusalem artichoke and green pepper sauce
• Banana ginger cake, caramel chocolate mousse and mango sorbet

The letdown, if one can call it that considering the overall suberb quality of the food, was the hare, which without wine was left too much on its own without support. To call it a letdown, however, might be overstating it as it was by all measures still very enjoyable. The star of the menu, in my opinion, was the fried scallop, which was heavenly.

Sufficient to say, based on this experience I can suggest Carma as quite a decent place to have dinner if you're in Helsinki. The price for the above menu was a quite reasonable 69 euros, including two small treats from the kitchen.

Layer cake

"You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son." -Eddie Temple from Layer Cake

I think the above quote summarizes life pretty well. The core thing here, in my opinion, is the fact that to get anywhere in life you need to take shit and shovel shit. You can't get around that fact. How much shit you need to shovel, in turn, is something you can affect. The smarter you are, the less shit you have to shovel. But you always have to shovel, so you better get used to the idea.

Now, why is this relevant? Over the past few years I've often come across situations where people seem to think that they can just jump over the step that was mentioned above. But it doesn't work that way. Even if you are able to temporarily see what life could be like in what Eddie calls the rarefied atmosphere, you won't stay there for long if you haven't served your time. I have to admit, even I occasionally forget this, but life has a funny way of knocking you back down to earth and eventually you learn to keep your nose to the grindstone.

Based on this, I would extend the above by suggesting that you can, at times, take a short leave from the treadmill. But every time you do, there is a discontinuity. If the discontinuity becomes longer than a certain threshold allows, you fall back down. The threshold is very subjective and depends on many different things. For the sake of conversation I'll simplify it and say that it depends on how much shit you've shoveled previously. Typically the more you shovel the more you learn and the more competent you become. But while becoming more competent, you also need to ensure that you're in an upwardly mobile trajectory. So the threshold also depends on your position in the layer cake. As a sidenote, it's interesting how as you mature, it appears that your technical competence, to an extent, becomes less relevant, but only if you've been upwardly mobile and have replaced your technical competence with another type of competence, which is essentially something related to understanding how the world and the systems that make up the world actually work. You can essentially, at some point in your life, replace the heavy lifting with cunningness.

All of this is essentially very obvious. But the implications are huge: my biggest gripe with younger people these days is the assumption that you simply don't need to shovel shit, that you don't need to learn hard technical skills, and that you'll just be handed everything on a plate. That combined with the situation that most young people are doing the wrong things and then creating holes in their CVs by doing wrong things and dropping themselves down in the layer cake again. Granted, during the past few years the recession has meant that life has become slightly more difficult, but I would still argue that having more spare time should enable youngsters to train and practice the skills that are relevant for them. In software participating in Open Source projects, for instance, is a brilliant way of making sure that despite not getting paid, you're still maintaining your technical competence and keeping yourself on the treadmill, thus keeping you from falling back down in the layer cake. Entrepreneurial activities are another way to achieve the same effect.

And finally: embracing opportunities. While grinding away with your shovel, one should always be on the lookout for opportunities to sieze. Opportunities that open up offer brilliant vehicles to demonstrate your competence and move up in life. But that's assuming that you don't make a hash of things. If you do, then the effect is negated, i.e. down you go.

Now, add network externalities to the soup and this becomes quite an interesting topic. Is your shoveling affected by others around you? Can someone help you with your burden or do the exact opposite? Is the world a zero-sum game or are you able to tap into synergies?

"Why don't you start calling me Gordon..."

On public transport... Again...

Yeah, so about public transport... Amazingly enough it appears that the amount of headaches public transport causes makes all of life's other problems seem very manageable and relatively insignificant. Let's recap...

1) The people. Not to sound elitistic or anything, but it's incredible how people are not able to take care of basic hygiene. It's very uplifting to wake up, wash up, and dress up, only to get on a bus and have a person who reaks of urine sit next to you and a person with long, unwashed hair with ticks and such sit in front of you. Not to criticize people's various lifestyles, but could you be considerate towards other people? Pretty please... And the polar opposite in this category are the women who are serious abusers of all sorts of fragrances. These aren't restricted to merely public transport, but all walks of life. We all know the types of people who you can smell from hundreds of meters away. Maybe tone down the amount of perfume?

2) The space, or lack off. I'm a bit over 1.9 meters tall and in decent physical shape. The number one problem is: leg room. Finnish buses aren't fortunately in the same league as the buses in Malta, but it is a rare day when I don't contemplate amputating my legs. It's impossible to fit in the seat. As an offshoot of being this size in general is that the width of my shoulders, while not in any way comparable to bodybuilders of any type, is what it is and I can't do much about it. Combine this with the first point regarding people, and things get interesting. Just today I ran across a situation where the bus was half-empty. I managed to get an entirely empty seat, but the legroom wasn't that nice. So I decided to sit by the aisle to compensate for the problem. Of course a fellow co-passenger absolutely positively has to sit next to me, despite the fact that there are more seats with more space available. Fair enough; who am I to take up two seats, so naturally I move over. Then begins the bitching and moaning: why do you take up so much space, can you be any narrower, I'm having difficulty staying on my seat, and so on... I'm sorry, but a) I am a big guy and have a certain amount of space that I must have in order to fit; I can't become any smaller without the help of a saw, and b) could You go on a diet, since the size of your arse is something that you can affect.

3) The drivers. Somehow it's very surprising that there can occasionally be people on bus stops who would like to get on a bus. Yeah, I know, it's completely unbelievable! But it just so happens that this is the case. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to bus drivers that there might be people on the stops. So please, look at the bus stops and slow down enough to see if people would like to get on. And if there are people, could you slow down and let them on, instead of driving past and acting as if you didn't see them at all? Then there is the fact that in Finland we occasionally have a phenomenon called slush. It's a type of mixture between snow and water and it's very annoying. So when the bus driver decides to pass the stop without stopping, of course the natural thing to do is speed up enough and aim for the slush so that you can throw it on the people who are standing on the stops. Especially so when near business parks: I bought these made-to-measure suits just so that you can destroy them to demonstrate your power over us mere mortals. And I enjoy having them dry-cleaned after every use.

4) The scheduling. It is surprising that we have different type of weather at different points of the year. It's so surprising that it seems that the guys who plan the schedule seem to think it's completely irrelevant to take this into account. So naturally when the winter comes you can just ditch your schedules and don't even bother looking at Reittiopas. The bus will come when it comes, if it comes. One would imagine that operating a bus fleet wouldn't be rocket science: you drive from point A to point B via a certain amount of stops. You plan the schedule to be realistic and then add compensating amounts of time when external, environmental aspects force you to do so. But apparently operating a public transport company is even more difficult than putting a man on the moon and getting him back in a sane amount of time.

So yeah, I'm having a difficult time to see why I should voluntarily suffer the public transport. Fair enough, the company does subsidize it enough to make it practically free for me. But let's ask the question in another way: if I promised to drive you from point A to point B for free, would you take the offer? Undoubtedly. But would you still take the offer if you had to take an incredible amount of shit at the same time? Most likely not. So I would like to be a nice person and hug all the trees and save the world, but my annoyance threshold is closing in at a pace which begs the question: is all this really worth it when I could just lease a BMW Z4 and drive like a lunatic and have fun commuting to and from work, instead of suffering public transport in all the multiple different ways as I currently do...