Energy

Sampo Pankki...

I previously blogged about my experience with Sampo Pankki and how they actively sought me out to sell me stuff and to manage the customer relationship. What followed from that meeting was absolutely hilarious...

The only thing I was interested in was to change my former pankkikortti/credit card which cost something to a free debit/credit card that they were offering for young customers. Well, the contract stuff didn't go as planned as they forgot to have me actually sign the contracts that were needed... So they send them to me and I return them signed. Then I go on vacation and they call me to tell me that they received the contracts. I'm sailing for a week and return just in time to get another phone call from them telling me that I need to send my old card back because they already sent the new one. Which is nice, especially since I haven't really been at home. I promise to send back the old one.

I look at the new card, which the bank decided to give to me in a horrible black color with tiny sprinkles of glitter on it. Yay. They I tell them that the basic layout would've sufficed, especially as I hadn't requested any special theme for the card. And I get told that unfortunately all credit cards will now have some theme. But wait! I ordered a debit/credit card (my exact words were that they should create an "identical" card under the new contract with identical credit limits, debit features, etc.). Apparently they decided to only give me a credit card. And what more, they in fact also altered the terms of the credit by themselves to require repayment of 100% of the balance on the credit card each month (I always pay the credit cards back monthly, but for the sake of security, I like to keep the minimum bill at 10% if for some odd reason some month I just absolutely have to use up ~all of the credit).

At this point my patience runs out. Over the years I've put up with all sorts of shit from Sampo Pankki. Their online bank is broken more often than it isn't. Their card systems are broken so their cards routinely don't get accepted in restaurants. The fees that they charge are significantly higher than their competitors charge. But I've still stayed with them out of some twisted sense of loyalty. But this was it, my patience with Sampo wore out. Fortunately the one thing they did manage to actually get right was the termination of the relevant contracts.

Amusingly enough I did call their competitor with whom I'm also a customer and told the nice lady there what had happened and how it would be really cool if they'd set me up with a similar setup as I had in Sampo as I would like to move my daily bank activities to their bank. And that I'm in a bit of a hurry as I cut my Sampo cards in half and I'm leaving shortly to NYC for a trip and would like to actually have something to pay with on that trip. And lo and behold, this competitor actually delivered everything brilliantly within a couple of work days. Amazing.

So, to sum up the key lessons from this experience: if you're living in Finland and thinking about which bank to go to, stay the hell away from Sampo Pankki. They absolutely, positively suck at more or less everything they do.

Criteria

I again stumbled upon some Finnish blogs (yes, I know, I should refrain from reading these as they just result in me digging blood from my own nose...) and lo and behold the topic of the day was about the criteria that people, in this case women, have for selecting their partners. The topic is naturally as old as humanity and one of the more common discussions online. That said, I got around to thinking about it again and came up with the following angle.

My approach is that people typically have various dimensions to their lives. In the western hemisphere and especially in the regions plagued by the protestant work ethic one of the core dimensions is work. Another could be social life, friends, and the related stuff. A third could be continuous learning, sparring with ideas, and the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction. Then we could have physical well being and so on. I haven't spent very long with the taxonomy and I bet that someone could devise a more elaborate one and ensure that the categories are as orthogonal as possible to minimize overlapping. But for the sake of conversation, let's say that we have these categories to our lives. Finally, one of these categories is naturally that which contains your romantic life, your partner, etc.

The amount of time people spend thinking about this category seems to be disproportionately large compared to the fact that there are more things to life than selecting a partner. And people can be satisfied despite being single. For the sake of discussion again, let's say that for each category there's a certain threshold level that the person needs to achieve in order to be content with that aspect of their life. You can, to an extent, manually adjust the threshold level, but in some cases there are certain boundaries within which you must work. For instance, I couldn't say that currently I'd be satisfied in my professional life if I'd be cleaning streets; I'm currently way more competitive and want to move upwards and achieve things. So because of my character and nature, I can't really set the threshold level lower than a certain boundary.

But regardless, we now have categories and threshold levels. The name of the game is now to live a fulfilling life and pursue happiness. My hypothesis is that in order to achieve that, you should initially ensure that every category achieves the threshold level. I might be very successful at work, but if my social life is significantly below the threshold level, I would still be unhappy. Maximizing a single category is thus a very sub-optimal strategy and it's bound to fail in the long run.

Thus the amount of effort that people seem to allocate for their love life is very disproportionate. And defining hard criteria to define who you can and cannot date is not only a somewhat bad idea, but also eventually bound to backfire as you're going to undoubtedly set the threshold levels too high and cause yourself to be very unhappy. The dynamic here is that it's a multifold game: first you have to find the set of people who fill your criteria. Then you have to have individual games with each of the people to see if they're interested in you. And this is followed by the typical dating games and so on. If you have set your threshold levels high, then naturally this will cause the set of potentially interesting people to decrease drastically. This then also has the added fun factor involved in the fact that if you are very selective, then typically the other person can also be very selective. Are you special enough to pass their criteria lists? If not, then it's game over for you unless you split and re-evaluate your own criteria.

Then there's the aspect of the criteria lists in general. Apparently very often a certain group of women wants their potential partners to be good looking, well educated and smart, wealthy, successful, and so on. What's the point in that? Now that we're striving for gender equality, my understanding is that women should be able to finance their own lives and thus they wouldn't have to be dependent on men. These types of lists still sound to me as if certain women still see the world as a place where the name of the game is that they trade certain traits that they possess for an affluent and powerful spouse who will then support their lives. Hmm... Well educated? What does this matter? If your partner is incredibly well educated in a certain area, let's say in some specific area of string theory, chances of you actually understanding anything about it are very slim. So you most likely won't have interesting discussions about that aspect of their life with them. Unless of course you're also into that specific thing and rank in the top 10 researchers on the subject. This of course was a provocative example, but I guess the underlying point is that specialization of your spouse in a certain academic field is very much irrelevant in regards to your love life. Then there's of course the whole discussion regarding whether or not the level of education can be used as a proxy for intelligence.

So, my take on the criteria lists is that there is essentially one criteria for me regarding whether or not I want to spend my life with someone. And that criteria is essentially whether or not I love them. If I don't, then that's that. And if I do, that's simple enough again. The whole process of dating is merely to check out the compatibility, and there's no need to analyze it deeper with lists of criteria. If it clicks, it clicks. Having shallow lists of criteria merely makes your job harder as you might in fact potentially also miss interesting people who could've been the perfect match for you despite the fact that they might miss some mundane bit of criteria by being e.g. 169 centimeters tall instead of being over 170 centimeters.

And once you do find someone who you love and can share your life with, then I guess the natural thing to do is spend the leftover time to work on the other areas of your life which still need working. Because if you don't, then eventually you're anyway going to end up with an unhappy life. Or that's my take on the subject, anyway.

Food

These days organic foods and whatnots seem to be all the rage. And as usual, I can't really understand what the fuss is about. As a disclaimer, I have no firm understanding of the subject, but if I understood correctly, the core arguments from the proponents of organic food revolve around the notions that 1) organic food is healthier for humans and 2) organic food is more environmentally friendly. The first point seems to relate to the fact that with no pesticides, growth hormones, and other more or less interesting things the resulting food, be it vegetables or meat, is more natural and thus humans don't get exposed to all the unknown nasties in the non-organic stuff that are stuffed into plants and animals to get them to grow faster. The second point relates to the first in the sense that due to the limited use of fertilizers and other stuff, we don't pollute the ground as much.

I guess there may be some truth in both points. One question that springs to mind immediately concerns the efficient agriculture that we have going these days: can we organically produce enough food to ensure that everyone can eat and survive? Some argue that organic food is less efficient to grow and plowing down the rainforest is the only way to go organic on a global scale. To be honest, I can't judge whether this is true or not, but it does sound plausible. Secondly, the health aspect is something that I again find myself wondering about. My understanding is that due to the organic philosophy, farms that grow organic food have much stricter control mechanisms for ensuring quality. Which is good. But building on that, I would argue that non-organic food should perhaps be put through tighter quality requirements as well and mishandling of food should be punished more strictly. Perhaps this would drive the prices up, but then we would have higher quality food. As part of the stricter controls, perhaps even more emphasis should be placed on researching the stuff that goes into the foods.

Personally I'm not too concerned with the extra stuff that goes into foods as long as blatant mishandling and high quality are ensured in the production process. The thinking behind my view is essentially that if you look at the organic crowd, they're arguing for a return to the basics: no extra stuff in the food. But if you want to go back to basics, why stop there? I've recently been tuning in on some discussions about hunter-gatherers, and I guess the ultimate argument is that agriculture itself was the worst invention man has ever come up with (I believe someone attributed this comment to Jared Diamond). The idea is that since agriculture came along, we stopped acting in a way that was natural for humans, got lazy and fat and began focusing on things that seemed like good ideas, but ultimately had little to do with our health. So ultimately you should just run around gathering berries and hunting animals all day long. Not only would you then have a healthier diet but also focus on other important aspects of health, i.e. proper exercise and fitness. To be even more provocative, ever since we shifted into an agrarian lifestyle, the size of human brains has began to decrease, and the notions that IQs have risen are also meaningless since naturally people will adapt and become better at predefined tests.

I may not necessarily be that much of a hardliner in the above thinking, but it does sound reasonable. While I still may not necessarily change my eating habits too much, what I will do is think about the hunger-gatherer aspect in the context of exercise. That topic may actually warrant another entry after I think about it a bit more.