The Eternal Coffee Break of the Soul

Fragility

2012-01-18T11:52:00.000+02:00

"If you design systems top-down, they're going to be fragile. If you let systems develop on their own, they're going to be anti-fragile. This is how mother nature works. This is how evolution works."

Some random thoughts on leadership

2012-01-16T12:52:00.000+02:00

If I ever lead any type of project related to "strategies" or whatnots in the future, I'll force everyone in the team to read through the US Marine Corps' MCDP-1 Warfighting document. The thing I really like about the military blokes is that they have a very clear and concise, well focused way of thinking about issues. Clear definitions and clarity of thought. The problem I encounter these days more often than not is that people can't answer simple questions such as what the objective of a project is.
Related to the above, I think a certain degree of martial arts also supports with clarity and teaches the dynamics of competition really well. Additionally it also teaches that blocking hits with your head hurts and losing isn't too fun.

Something to think about...

2012-01-11T09:34:00.003+02:00

If the foreign aid that Finland pays out yearly would be cut altogether along with the funding that goes towards aiding unemployed people find jobs, every unemployed person could be paid about 500 euros more per month. When you consider the impact that the country is making with both of the previously mentioned budgets, I'm starting to think that this would be a very smart move.

IT

2011-11-22T14:04:00.001+02:00

Corporate IT has had me scratching my head for years. For some odd reason it seems that just about everywhere I look corporate IT is fumbling and dropping the ball, leading to the obvious question of why is it so difficult to implement a rational and functional IT setup in an organization. There are so many dimensions to this, but if we scope the discussion to a tool perspective and put the end-user in the center, we can try to paint some type of a picture.

The common thing about all of the jobs I've ever held is that my main tool is my computer, which in my case has always been a laptop. A common policy in organizations is typically that the computer can be replaced once every three years (some more enlightened organizations may even allow cycles of only two years). But somehow it is not at all uncommon for organizations to provide their employees with laptops which are the cheapest money can buy. Or actually not. For instance I recently received a new laptop from work, which is an HP ProBook 4320s. It weighs very much, sports a relatively sluggish processor, a relatively bad battery life and worst of all it freezes more often than not. Apparently it costs somewhere in the region of 500 euros, give or take a bit. My personal preference at the moment is the new 13" MacBook Air, which I bought recently for about 1200 euros. Assuming that the machine is held for the typical three years, that means an extra cost of 233 euros per year, or about 19.44 euros per month. Of course that may sound a lot for the bean counters, but the device is better in every way I can measure: it is lighter, it is more powerful, it has a better resolution, it has an SSD drive (=it boots up faster, loads programs faster, ...), it has better battery life, it has OS X, and so on.

If we look at the boot up times, the MacBook Air boots up in, oh, 15 seconds. The HP boots up and runs through all of the associated startup procedures to get the system working in 3-5 minutes or so. Assume I work on 21 days in a month, with 3 minutes that's 63 minutes of boot time per month, with 5 minutes that's 105 minutes. With 15 seconds that's 5.25 minutes. So even with the low end estimate of 63 minutes for boot ups per month, if I cost more than 19.44 euros per hour or more to my employer, the rational option would be to go for the MBA. In fact, I would gladly pay 20e per month to my employer to be able to opt for an MBA over the HP.

The argument against high-specced machines has traditionally been that the average employee does not need the high specs because they only need to be able to use basic MS Office tools and such. But even in that case, it would be much more rational to look at e.g. netbooks or these days the new Chromebook-type computers. Acer's Chromebook is selling for about 300 USD, meaning that it significantly reduces the price when compared to the HP I was given. And I will venture a guess that that is a better machine than the HP. Of course in the Chromebook's case one could argue that it is more limited in functionality than a full-fledged PC. I haven't used one so I don't know, but I do know that the laptops leased by the NGO I'm working with are locked down so strictly that it is impossible for employees to install anything on them. And in that respect I think the Chromebooks would be more than comparable.

Now, the big question is why this sort of stuff is still going on in IT organizations and it's nearly 2012. This is just one part of the bigger puzzle of WTF. Other parts include "Why the heck is someone paying large amounts of money for email systems that don't work when GMail is free?"

Degree lengths

2011-11-11T10:37:00.001+02:00

Continuing on the theme of education, unfortunately it seems that the politicians are also very much clueless in regards to education. A big problem that is often cited as the reason for stricter control over students is that the time it takes the average student to graduate from university has been apparently growing. So obviously the logic goes that this must be bad because if students are in school longer they must cost society more directly and also if they are in school, that must mean that they are not working and hence are also causing losses for the society in terms of lost tax income. That may be slightly simplified, but my understanding is that that's the crux of it.

But, if you actually think about it, coming from an IT background we've often been criticized for taking jobs during our studying and then forgetting to graduate. For some reason it seems that competent software people tend to be dragged out of school very quickly after they enter school. So if you think about the case where a student de facto drops out of school to get full-time employment writing software, you in fact have a situation where the student isn't causing costs for the school (s/he's not taking up the time of the teaching staff, no need for expending material resources, no subsidies, ...). And most likely ending up in software means that the person will be making a decent living, at least in the region of the median income in the country. So a productive part of society. Of course one could argue that the lack of degree may come back to kick the person in the ass later down the line because for some odd reason having a piece of paper makes you a better person. But again the world has changed so that in technology, for instance, the time horizons have shortened to such an extent that because I dropped off the bleeding edge of web development in about 2005-2006, I'm already an ancient dinosaur, degree or no degree.

One angle to think about this might be the per student costs. The current academic system relies still too heavily on mass lectures, which cost a fixed amount to produce regardless of the number of attendants. So if people drop out of school and aren't replaced with new students, the average cost of producing the lecture for a smaller amount of students goes up, despite the cost remaining constant in absolute terms. But again this can be tackled either by shifting away from mass lectures (which I never liked anyway) or then opening up the application process and enabling more students to enroll thus mitigating the effect of the disappearing students.

However, this still does not really explain why everyone is so grumpy about students taking long to graduate. One of the most central reasons, I believe, is that there is a constant game of resource allocation going on. The government runs the universities in Finland and despite recent attempts to change the system to set up universities as foundations and attract funding from the industry and other sources the raw truth is that to a great extent universities get funded based on the amount of graduates they are able to produce. So there we go, there may not be any concrete benefit for anyone in getting students to graduate quicker, but there is a very clear link to resource allocation. So if the resource allocation mechanism would be changed, I think schools would also change their attitudes and not care too much about the invisible and costless students hanging around as an entry in a student database.

Now, looking at the situation from the other perspective, there might actually be very many benefits for students and the universities to keep a link between each other for as long as possible. Reflecting on my own career and studies so far, it's quite clear that taking a job at a multinational was quite possibly one of the best decisions I've made during my studies. It gave a fairly solid and concrete link to the otherwise somewhat disconnected subjects from school. How do you expect a person to truly understand about strategy based on lectures and articles without actually providing the individual with an opportunity to be a part of a strategy process and see for themselves what these things are about. And on the other hand being in a company but also hanging around on campus enables the student-employee to actually go to professors to discuss about potential problems that the student is working on in his career and actually brings potential work to the university and may help in applied research.

This subject could of course be discussed at greater lengths and deepened a lot, but even at a fairly shallow level it's quite clear that the whole perceived problem of students not graduating fast enough is just silly.

Income inequality

2011-11-09T10:58:00.000+02:00

It seems that an underlying driver in the dissatisfaction that the Occupy movement has stems from a certain level of inequality in regards to income and wealth. Hence the resentment towards the top 1% (which in the US nowadays means a yearly income of roughly 300-400k or total assets of 5-10M dollars). There is actually a fairly interesting podcast which was published recently by EconTalk on the inequality and the top 1%, although one should bear in mind potentially biases considering its a fairly libertarian publication.

But that got me thinking in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. I was recently lectured to by some people who wished to save the world that inequalities are bad and they showed some very convincing-looking diagrams which apparently prove that social problems stem from financial inequality. Or at least that there is a significant correlation if not a causality link. Can't really argue with the data, but I think there may be more going on than a single snapshot in time can capture.

Anyway, if we accept at face value that inequality is bad per se, then obviously we should try to decrease inequality. I'm always slightly hesitant of taxing the hell out of people since that gives the politicians too much money to do silly things with. So if there is a natural way of decreasing inequality, it would be nice. And it turns out that there is. It's called the recession. We now have data from the last credit crunch and the years following which shows that inequality has decreased, which must be good. And apparently the recession and all the fuss is driving it. The conclusion then must be that to make the world a better place for everyone (by making it a more equal place), we must create a sustained state of recession whereby the financial inequality would sort itself out.

Now, the sharper sticks in the crowd will no doubt already start thinking about different types of scarcity effects which may emerge as well as innovation and its links to crisis situations. And of course there is a very real risk that something very innovative might come out of this. Unfortunately, however, innovations tend to get productized and someone may get very wealthy from creating something useful. This in turn will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and this time the recession might have created this. So what the politicians could do is ensure that none of these heroes who might innovate themselves out of the recession can actually do so. And considering the track record of politicians in general, I feel very confident that they would be able to kill off all innovation.

So, there we go. Instead of worrying too much about reducing GDP numbers, prolonged recession or the fall of the euro, we should instead embrace all the chaos as it will reduce inequality and let's face it, inequality is supposedly the result of all evil. Ergo, the world will become a better place.

Tongue still in cheek.

Student subsidies follow-up

2011-11-07T11:14:00.002+02:00

Since my latest blog entry, the Facebook group demanding the demolishing of income thresholds tied to student subsidies has more than doubled in size to about 60 000 members, which is increasingly worrying due to the blatant greed and self-centeredness which is obvious from the statements being thrown around. Anyway, my viewpoint was already presented in the previous blog entry and the entry from September 2010 where I did the math with a few example cases, so let's not get stuck on that anymore.

At the same time SYL, the National Union of University Students in Finland has also posted their stance in a blog entry. It is fairly encouraging that they also essentially say that while they to an extent understand why the discussion has erupted in this way, they view the student subsidies in a similar fashion as other social benefits: they should be aimed at the people who in fact need support and shouldn't be treated as "reward".

Another interesting point in their post were the costs they had calculated which will arise from various types of changes to the system. You can find the details from the post, but to give some perspective to the discussion, the overall costs arising from supporting students run in the range of 800 million per year. The demands that the students are now putting forth would cost an additional 300 million per year. To contrast this, more targeted changes to e.g. support students with children by increasing their allowance by 145 euros per month would cost in the region of 23 million per year. This type of change I can agree with as I can imagine that supporting a family with children during your studies is something which demands not only time, but also resources in a completely different way than being single.

A friend of mine also linked an interesting article from Canada, where some people had talked to the local Occupy movement. Combine this article with another one on how college has been oversold and a picture starts emerging. I recall I've previously blogged about how the education system will be in turmoil and how essentially inefficient it is to run a system to highly educate people who end up doing routine tasks which don't essentially need high education only to provide businesses with one criteria with which to filter applicants with. Of course it's nice to give everyone a university education, but ultimately I think people should put into perspective what the education actually is and what the impacts realistically will be on their lives. It's completely ridiculous to assume that merely obtaining a university degree will automatically guarantee bliss. There's always a certain amount of shoveling excrement involved in establishing yourself and your career and, let's face it, with the increased amount of uncertainty on every level in the world, chances of failing a couple of times are fairly high.

This in fact links back to the original discussion on income thresholds in respect to student allowances. The system is a social welfare system meant to ensure that people are able to survive. Think of it as an air bag. The intention of the system isn't to provide you with a comfortable setup with which you can cruise through life without having to compete and create value. The purpose is to ensure that if you crash, you stay alive and can get back up again. If air bags in cars provided a near 100% survival rate and also provided a very comfortable pillow, there wouldn't be much of an incentive to be too careful in traffic as the worst-case scenario would involve a comfortable nap after and collecting insurance money...

In fact, amusingly enough in Finland students are very risk averse and tend not to even finance their studies with debt or if they do, it is only to a very limited extent. This means that unlike the people in the Occupy protests, graduating Finns very often have little or no debt to speak of, so from that perspective as well I think what will happen is that the demands will not be met with on any level and that the silly movement of greedy students will gradually deflate when people hopefully realize how silly the bitching and moaning actually is. But that still leaves the question of what exactly is the value and use of university education today and how will it be repositioned as it is increasingly clear that the landscape has changed in such a drastic way that the old system is very much ill-positioned and the drift must be addressed in some way. Hopefully it will be done intelligently, but I'm not putting my money on the politicians being able to do anything good with it.

Here we go again... Finnish students feel that they are treated unjustly...

2011-11-04T09:30:00.001+02:00

Oh dear lord, it's that time of the year again when the liberal arts students get their undies in a knot and decide that they're being treated very unfairly because they only get free education, free money, free healthcare, and to a fair degree the freedom to earn some money before the benefits begin to gradually get decreased as a function of income. A year or few back the cry was to adjust the allowance and housing subsidies upwards, and yes, to an extent there was a point in that: over a course of a decade or two the other social benefits given to poor had gone up but the students had been neglected. But that wrong was set right and the allowances were raised.

Now in the time of austerity measures and hell in the labor market the free-money loving (ok, who doesn't love free money...) students have decided that it is unfair that in some circumstances if they've earned too much, they are asked to return a part of the payouts handed to them in the form of allowances and housing subsidies (check out my post from September 2010 on financing studies for detailed calculations on how wealthy students actually can be before getting slowly cut off...). So a virtual mob of irrational (in a systemic sense, but on a personal level they are of course very rational for being greedy) students has showed up demanding various things. In fact the demands are not quite clear and in the good nature of Occupy Wall Street, it may have something to do with the fact that they are grumpy because they feel entitled to something and the universe has given them the middle finger. But unlike in the case of the Americans, in Finland the situation is ridiculously good for the students.

Apparently the demands are two-folded. Firstly the students feel that the limits for how much they can earn before they start losing benefits need to be raised. In practice the current situation is that you can live off of about 20k or so per year of income and benefits before you are cut completely off. To be honest, with that amount of money I don't frankly think that you should be subsidized. You're already given free healthcare from a dedicated foundation which focuses only on students and what is in practice a free university education. I think that after you are making 20k a year as a student, you can stand on your own two feet without the need for extra subsidies.

The second point which seems even more outrageous, and this seems to divide the students, is that they feel they are unjustly being punished in the form of taxes for working during the semester. I don't know who came up with this mind fart, but I don't think it needs any more countering. Of course it would be quite nice for me to abuse my unlimited (time-wise) student status and get my income tax-free for the rest of my life in Finland. Yeah...

Of course the Finnish student support system isn't bad, as can be easily proven by just looking at the amount of support and comparing it with other countries. That isn't to say that there aren't problems in the system. One valid point is that in certain cases students need to optimize their earnings so they don't go over certain threshold limits. In practice it is possible that by going over a limit by 200 euros on a yearly level will result in you having to pay back 500 euros. But again, this problem has nothing to do with the demands the students are making. This is merely a matter of having threshold levels instead of merely implementing a linear model of decreasing benefits, which I guess could be rather easily implemented.

Another problem is that the argument that life on merely the student allowance and housing subsidies is impossible in certain regions of Finland, e.g. Helsinki, where the housing costs are so high that only a small portion of the allowances are left to be disposed to non-housing related costs. If students actually take out a loan and/or do even a minimum amount of work on the side, the situation, however, isn't all that bad as can be seen from the calculations I referred to earlier. But if something must be done, I think it would potentially be ok to adjust the benefits at the lower end of the spectrum, i.e. give support to those who need it the most. But again, this is not what the students are demanding. They are demanding that they be rewarded for performing their studies.

Think about the logic of the demand a bit. It is essentially the same as saying that it is ok to cut social benefits from the lowest classes based on arbitrary criteria such as them having an alcohol problem and failing to show up for meetings but at the same time arguing that people who make, say 100k or more a year contribute in such great fashion to the economy and society that they should be given free money in the form of allowances and housing subsidies. That makes no sense at all and considering that people who are being educated at university levels in e.g. social sciences fail to see this flaw just begs the question of whether free education and all student subsidies should be cut altogether as apparently the years and years of state-subsidized education has still kept people at a, shall we say, intellectually handicapped level despite all efforts.

Sorry, I may have been quite harsh, but honestly I am disgusted by the blatant greed behind this.

Some more things to point out

2011-10-31T14:56:00.001+02:00

Stock markets aren't the economy. Getting the indices to go up slightly does not mean that it's clear sailing for politicians and that the problems have been solved. They shouldn't be used as proxies for that type of speculation.
Regarding speculation, however, basically all of the trade done on stock exchanges is one form of speculation or another. There is plenty of discussion about whether investors are rational or not, but it is sufficient to say that when investing money, the investor must at least personally feel that the trade is good for him to proceed and ergo the equity is mis-priced. Due to the uncertainty in valuation, however, the positions are speculative by nature, regardless of the duration that the equity is held. Hence it is silly for politicians to think that "speculative" trading on exchanges should be curbed. And besides, short-term trading brings volume into the market and provides liquidity...
... however! There are certain things that should be kept an eye out for. When one leaves the realm of the real and tangible world and heads into the abstract world of derivatives, these are the more dangerous waters. It may be wise to look at derivatives trading where the derivatives aren't used to hedge real-world situations but are instead used as lottery tickets. Hence naked positions and complex chaining of derivatives may be something to look at regulating a bit more, at least until more about that world is understood.
I'm also becoming more skeptical towards people whose jobs cannot be supposedly measured. Sure, we all live in a complex world, but you need to measure things to understand whether you're going in the right direction or not. Or whether you're even moving. Metrics can always be devised but creating good metrics may be difficult. But that should not mean that anyone should be allowed to hide behind the argument of "my job can't be measured because it is such a complex thing". If someone says that, then most likely they don't understand what it is that they are even doing.

Random thoughts

2011-10-24T15:04:00.003+03:00

We haven't even seen globalization yet; expats are still a minority and the inertia people face in relocating is still very large and a major part of international trade is done under the umbrella of big companies moving materials around and in accounts.
What are often bemoaned as the failures of capitalism are in fact symptoms of corporatism and corruption, not capitalism itself.
Capitalism shouldn't be unbounded and companies should be trusted to self-regulate; there are too many conflicts in interests, and besides, even in sports you always need someone to set and enforce the rules. I don't think there's an inconsistency here.

Evolution of technology

2011-10-18T20:55:00.002+03:00

As technology builds on technology, an interesting proxy for seeing how different technological inventions relate to each other comes from looking at patents and their citations. The image above contains a visualization of all patents in USPTO patent classes 370, 375, 379 and 455 which have been cited more than 100 and have been granted between 1976 and 2006. So in essence that is the structure of the most central patents related to mobile phones. The coloring is arbitrary clustering of the patents, but what is interesting is that the green, blue, and brown clusters are in fact the 375, 455 and 379 classes respectively. The clusters at the bottom of the graph are essentially the patents from class 370.

Another interesting thing to do would be to create a time-lapse of the network's evolution over time as well as to dig deeper into the substance and see why the clusters exactly emerge. Also, using this data it will be interesting to see how exactly different companies fit into the picture.

Einaudi: Nuvole Bianche

2011-10-10T15:47:00.001+03:00

Party in the CIA

2011-09-30T00:54:00.002+03:00

VR: Redux

2011-09-25T22:39:00.001+03:00

Ok, this is getting somewhat embarrassing already. Turns out I need to go to Kuopio in early November, so naturally I start figuring out what the best way to get there would be. And just to be fair, let's look at VR as an option. I punch in the trip details and I get the offers below. VR's ticket system does indeed seem to be very interesting as I understood that they have tried to imitate the airlines. One tip: if you imitate the airlines, at least do it properly so you'd maximize the profits. Screenshot below.

So, what we can see here is that VR has implemented three types of tickets. The "Perus" ticket, unlike the name might imply, is not only for the Perus Suomalaiset folk, but is the old 2nd class ticket, i.e. the regular train ticket. The "Joustava" ticket is the former business class ticket with added flexibility. And the new arrival is the "Ennakko" ticket for the early booker who can buy what is essentially a "Perus" ticket but with more limited options when it comes to making changes to the ticket. Now, why is the flexible economy ticket the most expensive? What's going on?

Additionally an interesting bit is in the trains themselves. I can leave Helsinki at 16:30 and arrive to Kuopio at 21:38 with the Pendolino and no need to switch trains. Or I can leave Helsinki at 17:12, make two train switches and arrive at Kuopio at the same 21:38 with the same Pendolino. The first two legs, however, are travelled with an InterCity 2 train and a regular, old train. So someone please tell me what the point of the Pendolino exercise was when the train that was supposed to improve travel times is actually operated at slower speeds than the older equipment.

Seriously, someone please put an end to this non-sense. Privatize the whole company as it appears that the government is impotent when it comes to making what is fundamentally a for-profit company work.

Edit: As a funny additional thing to notice is that the prices above are student prices. Blue1, a Finnish airline, is offering to fly me to Kuopio and back again for roughly the same amount of money that it would cost to get the Joustava student tickets. Oh, and the Blue1 tickets aren't student discounted...

Something wrong in the land of VR

2011-09-23T17:58:00.000+03:00

Anyone who's been a customer of VR (Valtion Rautatiet, the Finnish nationalized railway monopoly) in the past few years can fairly easily attest to the fact that the company has gone to hell. The most recent episode has been their failure in implementing a new IT system that has reached epic proportions as of late. But let's start at the beginning...

Operating a railway company isn't really rocket science. There are multiple facets to it, but let's stick to the transportation of people from point A to point B as that is the service that I mainly use. From my perspective I pay the company a certain amount of money so that it gets me from one geographic location to another in a specific temporal window. I don't care what the method is exactly, but I imagine that teleportation would revolutionize this business thanks to the radical reduction of time of travel. But anyway, my train trips consist of essentially two fundamental components: ticket procurement and the actual transport. On both dimensions VR has been fumbling with the ball.

Starting with the actual transport, to my recollection VR was decently good at operating its trains within the schedules that they had a decade or so ago. But over the past few winters, the quality has deteriorated. I mainly use the Helsinki-Turku track and more often then not jump off at the Salo station roughly three fourths from Helsinki to Turku. The travel time is typically around an hour and 25 minutes. It is not uncommon for the train to be 50 minutes behind schedule on a trip like that, which already brings it closer to 60% behind schedule. And that is when the train actually materializes and gets on its way. It's not also entirely uncommon for trains to not even show up, which leads us to another problem directly related to the business of transporting me from A to B...

Communication is in essence very much irrelevant as long as you provide me exactly the service that you promised and I can trust you to perform. If I can look at the schedule and platform information and trust that it is true, I don't really need other forms of communication with the operator. But when a train fails to materialize, there is a problem. VR has been getting the stick as of late for its inability to transparently communicate situations to the customers. It's normal that every once in a while something happens and causes problems. But then you should openly communicate what the situation is, what is being done about it and most importantly what is the impact that I have to endure. If you tell me that the train broke down and it will take 45 minutes to arrange another train, that is fine. I can then use the time to go do something else; purchase a magazine or get a beer at the station. But when you don't tell me what is going on, I have to work with the assumption that a train might materialize at any moment of time and hence I can't do anything else asides from waiting next to the track. More annoyingly there have been some occasions in which they have communicated a delay of e.g. 20 minutes. In one case I decided to pop by a store at the station and get a soft drink, only to return less than 10 minutes later to barely catch the train which had indeed showed up and was about to leave only 10 minutes into the 20 minutes given. I understand that these two demands of communication, if interpreted at face value, lead to a situation where the company will tell you every three minutes that the train will be three more minutes late ad infinitum. But if you actually think about it, VR should be an expert on operating a train network and hence one would assume that they would have the ability to give educated estimates on how long it will take to fix something. I've lived in Helsinki now for eight or so years and I'm able to give fairly good estimates on how long it will take to get from A to B with public transport at a certain time of day, assuming that A and B are within the areas I often go to. So VR shouldn't have a problem assessing how long it will realistically take to rectify the situation.

Related to the operation of the train network, VR has also fumbled with the procurement of new vehicles. They purchased a number of Pendolino trains, but those have been nothing but a source of grief ever since they started operating them. On the Helsinki-Salo route the Pendolino is only 5 minutes faster than the regular trains, and even that is only due to the fact that the Pendolino skips one stop on the way. Which raises the question of why even operate the Pendolino on that segment, since the Helsinki-Turku journey is not any faster with it. It has its uses on the longer trips to up north which actually do receive a fair amount of time savings due to the increased speeds... That is when the Pendolino is working. It appears that the train is unable to function properly when it sees snow. Also, it appears that VR is having its fair share of trouble in general from the weather phenomenon known as winter. Winters in Finland aren't anything new, so it is somewhat amazing that a "wrong" type of snow can severe the operations of a company that was founded in 1862 and most likely does know that winters occasionally happen.

Then onto the procurement of tickets. I absolutely hate to interface with humans in simple transactions such as purchasing tickets. Airlines have done a brilliant job of ensuring that these days I can even check in via a kiosk or even online with my phone at best and not have to endure the impotence of humans behind the counter. VR has, amazingly enough, had a fairly functional online ticket system from which I could send tickets to my phone or print them out and not have to endure additional pain. Unfortunately as of late I've been put into a situation where I receive free (as in beer) train tickets. Unfortunately I can only get the tickets by queueing at the station and talking to the lady behind the plexiglass. Standing in the queue today got me somewhat annoyed and I started measuring times. The five people on front of me in line took over 35 minutes to be served. That is 7 minutes per person, on average. There is no reason why it should take this long. If you use the kiosks (which aren't, by the way, working as of now due to VR botching up its IT system) buying a ticket typically takes you 30-60 seconds. It shouldn't take much more to tell a person behind a plexiglass to do the same. So that leads me to think that a) the system that the lady behind the plexiglass uses is too complicated or slow or b) the lady behind the plexiglass is too incompetent and slow. That normally wouldn't really bother me as I would never interact with her, but due to these "free" tickets I now must interact with her. Ultimately the problem should sort itself out as companies tend to make things more efficient over time to save money and increase revenue and it appears that the lady behind the plexiglass is a severe bottleneck. So you either automate her or lay her off and replace her with a more productive individual, who might be able to reduce the transaction time from 7 minutes to something a bit more decent. But, in the case of VR this won't happen because...

... VR is in fact a state-owned monopoly. Because of this status, VR will of course be a responsible employer and instead of having to be accountable to its private shareholders and make as much profit as possible, it will attempt to serve the "public interest" (see previous blog entry) better and offer safe employment and whatnot. And because of the monopoly, there is not competitive pressure to keep VR improving itself. In fact, the only pressure comes from VR's incompetence and the fact that at some point people will just decide that it's a better idea to use a car rather than a train to go from A to B. In fact, factoring in the delays and incompetent people, airplanes may actually start being significantly faster on domestic trips... And at best they are also cheaper already when going to e.g. Lapland.

Recently VR has decided that it wants to be an airline. Or at least use similar pricing systems. That should be a relatively positive note for anyone who has a degree in applied mathematics as you've just received another potential employer who will now employ you to tweak the algorithms ad infinitum. The rationale for this is of course quite clear: certain trains are especially popular. Like the 5 PM train out of Helsinki to Turku. This is always very full and unless you've reserved a ticket in advance, chances are that you'll get to stand or sit in the corridors. At the same time there are routes which are operated with half-empty trains, possibly due to the fact that VR needs to perform a function that is in the public interest and hence operate routes at times which may at best be uneconomical. So naturally VR wants a system to encourage people who can travel at off-peak times to use those trains and then charge significantly more from people who want to travel at peak times. Nothing wrong with that per se. The issue I have with this is that because it is a state-owned company and technically looks to do the whole "public good" thing, then I have an issue with the pricing scheme. People who are willing to pay more do not get preferential treatment in Finnish public healthcare and neither should that be the case with VR, if we strictly interpret it. If you want to act like a profit-seeking entity and leverage these types of approaches, then I feel that we should inflict some competitive pressure on VR as well by opening the railway system up for other companies as well. You shouldn't be able to cherry-pick in this way.

However, this brilliant plan to switch over to dynamic pricing models and new IT systems in fact failed very visibly. The system VR bought turned out to not scale, meaning that the whole ticket system has been in a state of havoc as of late with the primary companion, our old friend Accenture, coming out into the public media and giving statements along the lines of "We have no idea what is going on." So, again the plague of the public sector, i.e. the incompetence of playing the role of customer in IT projects, has hit again. To be fair, many private sector companies also fail in these types of large operations, but fortunately then they feel the whole impact themselves. With the case of government-owned monopolies, it's the tax-payer who ultimately foots the bill for this type of ass-hattery. I wouldn't say it's so much a problem with Accenture as it is with VR. Accenture is a profit-seeking company which of course lies and cheats in the offers it makes and ultimately churns out endless amounts of billable hours. That is precisely why you want to be very much on top of things and keep your consultants on a very tight leash if you're the customer. Otherwise they will bend you over the table and let you have it. Additionally, what kind of moron doesn't stress-test a system thoroughly, and more importantly what kind of moron does a complete roll-out of a new system all at the same time? If there's one thing I've learned about IT systems, it's that you want to do rolling launches where you start with updates to certain parts and see how it goes from there. At any point of time if things go wrong, you immediately revert to the old system to contain and mitigate the impact of your incompetence. But how does the super-team of VR and Accenture go about it? Yes, in the same way as our other old friend, Danske Bank... Hilarity ensues.

I guess I could continue onwards with this, but as one final note, I truly enjoy the pain that the lady behind the plexiglass inflicts on me. After waiting for over 35 minutes, she tells me that the ticket voucher I have from the Ministry of Labor is not valid. It has been made invalid overnight with no type of grace period. Then when I decide to pay with actual money, she is unable to comprehend a simple statement such as "1 student ticket to the 7 AM train on next Monday from Salo to Helsinki". Then when she finally is able to produce the ticket and I tell her to just give it to me, she insists on printing receipts and then placing everything in a paper sleeve before giving the pile of paper to me. Which is rather interesting as VR brands itself as a green company. I merely want the ticket and nothing else: why do you insist on throwing so much paper at me which I anyway will throw away...

The Corporation and The Public Good

2011-09-21T20:38:00.000+03:00

Just a quick note. I put the documentary film named The Corporation on and have been watching it out of the corner of my eye. I've seen it before, so essentially I'm just passing time and know that it is very much anti-corporation in its agenda. But one thing that jumped up was in the first part of the film how they clearly articulate that the primary purpose and responsibility of a company is to create profit for its shareholders. The continue by contrasting this to the public good by stating that profits surpass even public good in the priorities of a corporation.

But, what is public good? Can it be quantified or measured? What generates more public good and what less? If Finland supports the bailout of Greece, does that create public good for the Greek and does it reduce the public good for the Finns? Is it a net positive or net negative change? With a brief amount of thinking, I tend to feel that defining public good is very problematic. If public good as a concept was clear and everyone could subscribe to it, very many problems would be solved. So in this context I think contrasting the profit-driven nature of companies with something as hazy as the "public good" is somewhat problematic. Especially when you consider at the core what companies do.

Companies are profit-driven by nature and by legal requirements and obligations to its shareholders. Of course companies can engage in many nasty red ocean strategy tricks and be very cutthroat. But at the end of the day the company must provide a good or a service to a person or group who is willing to pay money for it. If a company is unable to perform this, it will soon go out of business. So, if a company produces a good or a service for an individual who buys it and which results in the decrease of "public good", is it the company's fault or the customer's? I don't think it's the TV network's fault that TV is full of reality shows: I think it's us as the consumers who are to blame since we (or at least some of you) seem to want to watch them. But maybe the customer is tricked and doesn't know better. Maybe the state should look out for the "public good" and tell the individual that reality TV in fact decreases "public good"? But I'm not sure that it does. The concept of "public good" is most likely very much tied to the context, the values of the perceiver, and whatnot. So more often than not an elite, typically a political one, is imposing their concept of "public good" upon me. Fortunately, at least in Finland, it is often enough the case that the results aren't significantly net negative and occasionally they might be net positive so that I don't have to storm to the streets.

The environment is often considered important. It is argued that it is in the interest of everyone to reduce pollution and save the environment. I guess at the end of the day the planet itself doesn't really care what happens to it as it will always survive in one form or another. Humans, however, may not if we pollute the planet we inhabit to an extent where life becomes impossible. So from the perspective of humanity, preserving the environment in a state that allows us to survive is very much net positive. I think nobody contests that. But how to get there? Recently nuclear power has been decided to be opposed to the "public good". The people who want to further "public good" have instead seemed to decide that fossil fuel based energy production methods are a better way to go, or at least less net negative than nuclear power. But strangely enough there is also a healthy amount of literature suggesting that nuclear is in fact much better than coal, oil, or gas. In this case, again, putting some metrics down and trying to assess via those which route produces more "public good" might offer some more support on decisions. Perhaps a structured way of defining "public good" in this context would be warranted. Unfortunately I haven't seen this being done (then again, I haven't looked that much, so please send me links to articles if you know of anything interesting). So far my limited understanding is based on following the research of a friend of mine who seems to take a relative engineering view of the problem and writes pieces which appear quite transparent and coherent. And based on that I think that while nuclear may not be the ideal way to produce power, it creates more "public good" than the alternative of fossil fuels (based on direct deaths, CO2 emissions, cost, ...).

Linking back to the original point, as it's very much unclear in the power discourse what is in the interest of the public, declaring that companies are bad for putting profits ahead of the "public good" seems somewhat childish, especially when it seems that very often these two in fact appear to correlate. Especially when you consider the alternative proposed, i.e. public ownership. For some strange reason a strong government tends to historically lead to increased centralization of power and hey, let's face it, nothing bad has ever come out of that. No government has ever oppressed its citizens. Sounds like a brilliant idea. Let's look at the shades of gray a bit more, shall we?

Stockholm Half Marathon 2011

2011-09-19T11:41:00.001+03:00

Well, the first and most likely last half marathon of this season is over and what can I say... The Swedes definitely know how to arrange an event. The half marathon in Stockholm was in just about every way better than its Finnish counterparts, and not least because I've managed to run my best times there. Everything just seems to work there and the overall atmosphere was amazing.

Related to my last entry about measurements, I guess it's only good to present some measurements from this exercise as well. My target time was 2h00m00s (my previous time from Stockholm was 2h00m21s, or something thereabout). This means 7200 seconds or 341.26 seconds per kilometer (or 5m41.26s) for 21.098 kilometers. And the result? 1h57m36s according to my measurements (the official time was 2s better, but as I took measurements with my own watch and the kilometer times are based on those, I'll just use the 36s one for the review of the run).

The chart below is probably the most relevant one, considering that I wasn't able to get my heart rates due to some technical glitches. The diagram shows the per kilometer deviations from the target time and the red line shows the average deviation from the target per kilometer over the entire run. The biggest thing to note is the profile of the diagram, which I think has slightly improved when compared to previous events. My main sin, as shared with so many other runners as well, is starting too fast and then tiring out when the going gets real. The positive bit is that I was able to keep the initial pace fairly well intact and at no point did I entirely collapse.

This time I was able to find the two hour pace runner and tagged along for the first eight kilometers. This resulted in the fairly accurate times for the first four kilometers after which the pace runners in fact sped up a bit. The seven kilometer blip is due to a drinking station hassle. The pace keepers started slowing down a bit at around eight kilometers to apparently adjust the pace back to the two hour target, but considering the relatively good feeling I continued going at my own pace and decided that as long as the pace runners don't catch me, I'll be very well off in respect to my target.

One thing that separates Stockholm from Helsinki is that the amount of entertainment along the course is significantly higher. I didn't keep exact count, but I think there were five or so DJs spread along the course and two or three live orchestras playing music. This was in fact very helpful in keeping up the pace and positive mood during the mid part of the event. During the 18th kilometer my run started dragging a bit as can be seen from the diagram. It turns out, however, that Prodigy's latest album is a very decent approach to keeping the pace at least somewhat reasonable after switching to defensive running and changing the focus from running as quickly as possible to ensuring that the original target is at least met. And of course the fact that the last kilometer or two of the track were surrounded by people cheering you on helped as well. Overall the run was surprisingly enjoyable, especially when compared to the HCR'10 and Espoo Rantamaraton fiascos of last year.

Finally, here are some of the official statistics from the organizers for my run:

Split	time	diff	min/km	km/h	place
5K	0.28.17	28.17	05.40	10.61	5869
10K	0.55.18	27.01	05.25	11.10	5280
15K	1.21.42	26.24	05.17	11.37	4843
20K	1.51.06	29.24	05.53	10.20	4937
Finish	1.57.34	06.28	05.54	10.18	5086

Overall there were about 10500 or so runners, so in that respect I'm also relatively satisfied that I finished in good mid-range territory ranking-wise. The next steps from here will be to try to solidify my running and try to be able to consistently run sub-2 hour times. I don't hold any serious expectations of being able to improve my time too drastically and don't really even hold that as a priority. For the rest of the winter I think my focus will be on learning how to swim. Additionally a classmate of mine also suggested taking up Savate, which I at least tentatively agreed to. So, essentially the goals for next year will most likely be to run at least one half-marathon with a target time of less than two hours (ideally matching 1h57m34s or faster) and to complete a sprint triathlon with no specific other target (if I'm not able to find a suitable triathlon from Finland to try, then I'll just test out the triathlon by myself to see how that feels). It may be also reasonable to revisit these targets early next year to see what the feeling then is and possibly revise them as needed, depending on e.g. how the swimming goes.

But for now I'm just going to kick back for a moment and try to get my legs back into shape again.

Measurements

2011-09-13T13:34:00.000+03:00

One thing I've learned over the years is that I can't trust myself. We humans tend to be absolutely terrible at many things. Our yearning for causality and stories leads us to make conclusions which actually don't hold true under closer inspection. We are influenced by feelings of fear and greed and often succumb to hubris. So it's no wonder why it seems that the life of a typical person is very much a tragicomedy.

To tackle the above, I've been trying to impose some structure in my life via quick and easy exercises. In a separate blog I'm documenting the year of my life from a daily financial perspective: how do I spend money, are there any easily observable trends, and so on. In HeiaHeia I try to track my exercises. And recently Google Docs Spreadsheets combined with forms and linked to the home screen of my iPhone provides me with an easy, quick, and flexible framework to start tracking anything with relative ease. The point here is that gathering data is critical to be able to do any type of educated decisions. Having a hypothesis about what to change to improve a bit in your life is fine, but if you don't have any way to judge whether or not the results materialize and are what you wanted, it's relatively pointless to invest any effort into change.

On the other hand, gathering raw data and analyzing it also motivates you by giving very concrete and quick feedback with which to evaluate how you're moving along. Measuring the times of standardized jogging routes enables you to see how much faster you're able to run. Add a subjective measurement of how the exercise felt and you can start analyzing on a rough level what your strong points are and what are the potential shortcomings when running training for a half-marathon. Or tracking your spending enables you to find things such as how much money you spend on pointless things or in bars and how rigorous financial discipline is useless if you go splurge on an individual day every once in a while.

I guess ultimately this entry is merely a personal note to remind myself again that everything can be measured and just about everything should be measured. And once you start measuring things, you can start improving them. And that's good since at least for me happiness correlates relatively strongly with change achieved in a certain timeframe.

Patent citations

2011-08-19T16:02:00.000+03:00

Interesting bit of the day: if you look at granted patents and calculate the age of the patents that the given patent cites and calculate averages, it appears that the selection of companies affects the value quite a bit. In my case the aggregate patents of about 120 companies involved in either high-tech/electronics and/or automobiles shows that on average newer patents are cited than in the case of all the patents. The timeframe has been the patents from 1976 to 2010. Diagram below, blue bars are the first group and green is the group with all patents.

More on education: incentives and linearity

2011-08-17T12:27:00.000+03:00

I think I've written about education on multiple occasions, but let's revisit the topic again. So to briefly recap, the western education system is out of control. On one hand the fees universities are charging are growing rapidly, excluding the possibility of higher education for the masses. At the same time, the level of education when adjusted for the cost is questionable as MIT and Stanford are giving away lectures and materials online for free. This means that ultimately the student is merely paying for the stamp of approval that the prestigious university with its reputation is able to provide. Less reputable universities thus cannot charge as high prices as the elite universities. And in Finland all of this is moot as the government subsidises studies and the main problem here is how to get students to graduate as quickly as possible so they can start making money to pay taxes (i.e. become productive cogs in the system) and minimize the economic impact of their studies via costs.

Ultimately there is a crisis afoot here, namely because more people strive for higher education based on the assumption that higher education will give you higher salaries. Along with cost of education, unemployment is also on the rise meaning that for the benefits from potentially increased salary take longer to materialize. And at the same time we are straying very far away from the questions regarding what the purpose of education is, to the society, to the academia and to the students.

Reflecting on those points, I keep getting this feeling that the linearity of my studies is counterproductive. I'm selected at the age of 18 to start studying towards a MSc (Tech) without really any concept of what this stuff is about, what sort of skills I might need and the only way I can keep track of where we are going in e.g. mathematics is trying to tie the concepts down to concepts I already know. And then eventually further down the road I might notice that some of the things are in fact useful (e.g. it is nice to know the basics of matrices, eigenvalues and eigenvectors if you want to figure out which trends are central in generating and sustaining violent conflicts in the Middle East) and then you need to revisit the issues. But alas due to the linear fashion of studies, you already went through the "basic" courses years ago and revisiting the courses and asking more intelligent questions (as you now have a better understanding of applications, etc.) is looked down upon as you are merely wasting more resources.

So, to tease out what the problem is, we can cite Warren Buffet's partner Charlie Munger, who told us that to understand why things are the way they are and to predict where they are going, you need merely look at the incentives. And none of the larger institutions at the current stage really have incentives to actually teach the students anything real. It's only if the students pursue an academic career that they might with a certain degree of probability need the basic skills taught in Masters programs. And even then it's still most likely cheaper to teach the skills at the later stage again than to spend enormous amounts of effort in the earlier stages to make sure that the entire class understands the ideas and concepts in class.

Another point is the cyclicality: something should be done about that. The reason why Finnish engineers have traditionally been fairly good is mainly due to the fact that at a very early stage of their studies, the students often already go to the industry to work on real issues. Their work naturally gives them problems to think about, which they can then bring back to school and try to work out, creating a tighter linkage to their studies by giving more motivation that the things being studied are actually useful. It also benefits the industry because they get relatively cheap labor which also is very rapid in adapting and learning things due to the close link to the university and the framework behind the students which supports learning. So while bearing this in mind, it seems very counterproductive for the state to demand quicker graduation times from students, as that would wreck this dynamic. But on the other hand if education costs were shed upon the shoulders of students in the form of tuition fees of say 10 000 euros per year, this is also quite a high opportunity cost for having a support network you can potentially tap, especially when considering that a person who goes to say 20 courses a year actually generates more costs for the university than a student who merely takes, say, three courses a year. So this should also ideally be addressed when redesigning the education systems.

Sorry again for not having any real tangible solutions at this stage, but I thought it worth ranting about these subjects just for the record and for future reference when I go through these entries at later stages.

The reason for the unrests in London?

2011-08-16T18:48:00.000+03:00

It's the same as the reason for many problems: people don't think things through. Even people who think they have nothing to lose have many things to lose. They just haven't thought it through...

Swimming briefs or not?

2011-07-22T10:45:00.000+03:00

I am increasingly convinced that doing a triathlon next summer is a good idea. The exact variant is yet to be determined, but I'm starting to think that maybe a sprint distance at 750m swimming, 40km cycling and 10km running is a good way to get acquainted with the sport. So, why triathlons? The rationalized answer is because practicing the three different sports may in fact be more healthy in the long run when compared to only running, which itself puts a fair bit of pressure on joints and whatnot when running around the pavements in the Helsinki area. But that's not the real reason. The real reason of course is because I seriously want a new roadbike and what better way to rationalize the acquisition than to state that I absolutely need one for a triathlon.

Anyway, cycling and running should not be too difficult. The thing I'm slightly worried about is swimming and the fact that it's about a decade or so since I've last done any swimming. I'm just not that into the whole water business and I've never really liked spending time on beaches and such. You just get sand everywhere and you can't even dress like a human since it's too bloody hot and typically there aren't even shades around. But yeah, swimming is quite relevant from the perspective of a triathlon and fortunately enough it's also the first part of the shebang, meaning that if I happen to drown, at least I didn't waste effort in cycling and running. Fail fast, if you will.

So, swimming then needs to be tackled and naturally you need the appropriate attire to swim, namely the swimming suit. And oh joy, here we stumble on the age old argument about whether or not men can wear swimming briefs ("Speedos") or not, and of course I can't let a fight like this slide by without taking a stance. And of course the answer is that the only appropriate way to dress is with swimming briefs, or "Speedos". Period. End of story. It's as simple as that.

If you think about it, it's in fact quite obvious and I don't understand why there even is such a big fuss about the topic. First of all, swimming is exercising and when exercising, your attire is based on functionality. When training, it doesn't matter if you look stupid or not, the point is that you must dress in a functional fashion. I'm always baffled when you see women in polo shirts and sporting nail polish show up in gyms and pretend to work out. I go to gyms to work out and get sweaty, ergo I dress appropriately and don't really care whether it fits my sartorial image or not. And in terms of swimming, the appropriate and functional way to dress in in swimming briefs: they offer better movement ability and the fact that they are not a tent (unlike the things the Americans wear) you can actually swim more efficiently. And when you're done and leaving the swimming pool, they also dry fast and don't take as much space.

Now, someone will of course start bitching and moaning about the fact that they look ugly when you're on the beach and women will never like you if you wear "Speedos". Those just demonstrate prejudice and small mindedness. And besides, the point is moot since there is absolutely no reason why a civilized person would go on the sand to grill themselves in the first place. So that point is purely hypothetical anyway. Instead of being chavs, civilized men instead will spend their summers doing something productive, like sailing or playing sports, and dress appropriately. And when just lounging around, they shall anyway wear long trousers (preferrably linen or some other lightweight fabric) and polo shirts to look reasonable.

So there you go, the whole argument about briefs or not briefs when going swimming is hereby solved once and for all.

Decoupling and deconstruction

2011-07-15T12:42:00.000+03:00

One of my pet theories is that the increasing level of infrastructure (security, transport, capital, ...) will decrease the size of companies. This summer it appears that the oil and gas industry is experiencing a trend of spin-offs and splitting of companies, without even regulator involvement. First Marathon Oil spun off Marathon Petroleum and in today's Financial Times ConocoPhillips announced its intention of splitting itself into two. Interestingly enough after yesterday's announcement the markets rewarded ConocoPhillips with and increase of 7.5% in valuation. So whereas nuclear scientifically fusion energy seems to often fail to materialize in the corporate world, fission certainly seems to have worked in this case.

But of course some caution should be applied before we dive into the theory of infrastructures and company sizes. Without being an expert on oil and gas, my guess is that the industry in itself is in the midst of a turmoil and from an investor perspective I would be careful as my common sense says that peak oil will have most likely already happened and that the industry, at least in terms of oil, will is already declining and buy-and-hold strategy will at this point would only result in tears in a matter of years. But another driver may be increased competition in declining markets and the inability for a large organism to adapt rapidly enough, further held back by the immense amount of effort wasted in internal communication and other functions which spin out of control as a function of company size.

It will, however, be interesting to keep an eye on what is happening and whether or not the benefits of these fission exercises will be sustainable, or whether the markets merely rewarded the companies for making any type of effort.

Don Quijote and EU's fight against credit raters

2011-07-13T12:33:00.000+03:00

Amusingly enough EU seems to have been caugh with its trousers down by the credit raters, who have in the past weeks downgraded a couple of more EU members into the junk bond category. And as appears to already be typical for the eurocrats, the approach now is to focus on the annoying smoke by attacking the credit raters instead of addressing the real problem, namely that of the horrible state of competitiveness and finances of its member states.

As part of the latest news today, a couple of EU commissars have been making interesting statements. Firstly there is supposedly a cartel of the top three credit raters, according to Viviane Redding. Well, judging by the past few years, the level of competence demonstrated by the raters in regards to e.g. evaluating the credit worthiness of subprime mortgage CDOs and the whole shebang, one would assume that entry barriers for a new rater wouldn't be very high. That is assuming that a new entrant could provide more credible ratings. I'm not an expert, but I fail to see how a cartel would actually work here. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but in any event I do agree that maybe more competition would be better, but rushing out and calling cartel without credible proof seems somewhat weird.

Secondly the fact that raters will change ratings has apparently caught another commissar by surprise. Well, you know, assessing the situation and changing ratings accordingly is precisely what raters do, as surprising as it might be. And even more surprising undoubtedly is that if raters don't see improvements in the actions and the expected outcomes of the actions, ratings will drop. Perhaps raters could talk with the parties that are being rated about different things, but ultimately I understood that the whole point of having third parties perform ratings was that investors who want more information on which to act could get a somewhat reliable, unbiased and objective assessment of the situation. Interestingly enough, however, it appears that historically the raters, e.g. in the subprime case, may have had conflicting interests and biases towards rating subprime mortgage CDOs higher than they should have, which I think then comes back to the whole situation where I personally would like to see raters remaining somewhat detached and distant from the parties who are likely to gain or lose basing on the ratings.

But all of this is ultimately very much moot as the fundamental issue still remains: the EU has made a total hash of things and it should now focus on fixing the core causes of the whole trouble, i.e. increasing the competitiveness and entrepreneurial activities while decreasing the corruption and inertia in the troubled member states. If this isn't done, then ultimately arranging bail outs and negotiating loan terms is pointless as the loans will never be repaid unless the countries actually get their financial growth back on track. And while this is going on, maybe EU shold resist the temptation of lashing out at windmills...

Mobility and performance

2011-05-30T09:01:00.001+03:00

Traditional view holds that from the perspective of an individual the best approach to career development is to move positions every three to five years. Less than three years and you will come across as an organization climber who will most likely have not had enough time to actually pick up the experience or the skills of the previous position. Or worse yet, fast moving individuals may move fast because they get canned as soon as it becomes apparent that they are little more than hot air.

But stick around in a position for much more than five years and very often development on a personal level grinds to a halt. I had the pleasure of serving two steps underneath a brilliant boss for a while and he held the view that you should do a single thing three times; on the third time your performance will peak. The rationale is simple. On the first round you have no clue what you're doing. The second time around you have some clue and can formulate a more educated plan. But it is on the third time around that you are able to truly refine the process and will have become increasingly adept in what you are doing. But on the fourth time people tend to get lazy, if we put it in a simplistic fashion. Efficiency and output quality may begin to deteriorate.

So extrapolating from those viewpoints, it is thus fairly logical that it is both in the individual's as well as the organizations' best interest to have individuals move around. But I recently read some interesting bits about why taking this approach too far is also very counterproductive. In a recent article the Economist talked about Barca, the football team, and how it has achieved success while emphasizing on local values and growing its own players, as opposed to using big money to attract high-fliers. The article continues and cites studies which show that successful individuals on Wall Street will very often suffer deteriorating performance when they switch to other organizations. This would then suggest that it may in fact be in the organizations' interest not to necessarily go along with the rapid ascent of individuals.

So, where then is the balance between acquiring fresh blood and new ideas versus cultivating a strong internal culture and values? The counterargument to the culture and value argument is that very often when organizations grow old and large, they tend to begin to detach themselves from the "real" world; they gather inertia, organization builds on top of organization and performance deteriorates. Amusingly enough literature is full of these cases. Just look at any piece of cutting edge management literature from a decade back and skim over the examples of successful firms. My hunch is that most of them will have succumbed and are either in trouble or have already folded. Of course if a company is able to keep its well functioning culture and cultivate it appropriately, superior performance should ensue. But take for instance Google. The question is that has Google already peaked? It may still continue and churn out very hefty profits, but has the rapid recruitment drive already hampered what originally was the coveted Google culture? Have large numbers of employees already lowered the average performance of individuals; has mediocrity taken over the company yet? If not, chances are good that it will in a while. Because examples of this type of dynamic are plentifully around.

Riddle me this...

2011-05-08T16:01:00.000+03:00

If every company only hires (according to HR, anyway...) the top-of-the-class, top 1% of the population types, why isn't the unemployment rate at 99% yet?

Eras

2011-04-14T18:34:00.000+03:00

Change is strange. It's sort of like an untrue, even dreamlike feeling booking meeting rooms and meetings with agendas such as "Debriefing/handover of responsibilities" and "Exit practicalities".

More random thoughts

2011-04-11T12:53:00.000+03:00

Capitalism and free markets aren't the problem. Big corporations and the fact that there are no free markets is the problem. Confusing capitalism with corporatism is a mistake that leads to many problems and incorrect conclusions.
If we're optimistic, the drivers of individualism, education, and technology, amongst others, will drive the decline of large corporations and return the system to a functioning competition-based free market. This will be because the friction and missing infrastructure bits that big corporations were able to get past when small companies couldn't will be reduced.
To enable the above, one must decide what type of a mechanism should be used to revitalize the system. Competition law and regulators are an obvious choice, but this requires the regulators to act more decisively and more intelligently in the future.

Random thoughts

2011-04-04T10:08:00.001+03:00

Most disruptions can be taken apart into smaller pieces, which in turn often are merely small linear, evolutionary steps. Just like the metaphorical boiling frog if you look at only the small delta, you miss the big change that can make things really hot for you.
Flexibility and adaptability is crucial for survival. Interestingly enough people seem to cling onto ideologies even in situations where the pragmatic option would be to change your stance. Like in martial arts, fixing yourself into one stance will again land you in a tight situation when the circumstance changes.
An offshoot of the previous and originally from some smarter person: communism for 20-somethings stems out of passion, but communism for 40-somethings stems out of idiocy.
"I'd rather be a shareholder than a customer of [insert any bank here]." Because of incentives, banks tend to take better care of shareholders than customers.

Told'cha, ya shoulda killed me last year!

2011-03-31T19:18:00.002+03:00

Why PS-accounts aren't selling?

2011-03-31T11:00:00.000+03:00

Hmm... Could it have something to do with the unpredictable tax regime of Finland and the fact that the current climate seems to suggest that not only will taxes be going up but every succeeding government seems to aggressively change pension legislation. So excuse me while I don't see any point in locking my assets up for over 40 years with a product that very efficiently ties me to a Finnish banks, tax authorities, and government. If someone, however, offered good productized solutions for small investors to spin their savings into a offshore fund so that the government couldn't constantly kick your teeth. That I could be interested int.

Money

2011-03-22T14:11:00.000+02:00

Many small, and large, companies have been ruined with too much money. --Jorma Ollila

Home ownership

2011-03-17T16:44:00.000+02:00

One thing I've never understood is why the government absolutely feels that it is highly important to get everyone their own home. The latest subprime crisis in the US, which has its roots firmly tied to governmental practices of encouraging banks to lend to more and more people is a good example of what can ultimately happen (of course there were quite a few other factors in play as well, but the last couple of administrations have essentially shoved home ownership down the throat of just about everyone).

In Finland it may not necessarily be so blatant, but the government clearly encourages home ownership. Home loan interest is tax deductible to a certain point, first-time buyers get preferential treatment in the form of government backed loans, protection from increasing interest rates, and so on. And the profit from selling your home is exempt from taxation. With all these factors in play, is it really that strange that housing prices in Finland are what they are? Or is it that strange that in the past years news have emerged of individuals purchasing homes with little (less than 10%) or no own capital?

I talked about this issue at work with some people, and the general consensus that people appeared to have was that all of this is entirely acceptable. Buying property is very safe, prices nearly always rise, etc. Seriously. Only a few years have passed since we saw what this type of thinking can potentially bring about and already the lessons have been forgotten. Not too many people make the largest investments of their life with a leverage of over 9:1 in respect to their own capital. Especially in a market which appears to be a bubble that is being sanctioned and built by the government.

Based on this I'm having a terribly hard time seeing myself investing any of my wealth into Finnish property markets: 30-year-loans and state subsidies smack of a horribly bad idea. But I hope that if and when the bubble bursts, this time around we won't encourage moral hazard by bailing out any of the people who have voluntarily put their heads in the guillotine.

And what about home ownership in general? You are of course free to buy your home. But only if you can afford it. As of now, I don't feel that I can afford to purchase a home for myself and thus I will not buy one. Despite the fact that the banks would be more than happy to provide financing for just about any type of apartment.

Some ideas

2011-03-03T15:08:00.000+02:00

I was listening to Simon Cole give a presentation earlier today about value creation in the media industry these days. Overall I think the message was very much in line with intuition, but the two items that I thought worth picking out from there were related to inertia and to democratization.

I've often talked about inertia and I'm increasingly confident that in the longer run the negative aspects of inertia will outweigh the relative benefits of being big once the basic infrastructure for companies matures and does not penalize for smallness as much as it used to. In respect to dinosaurs attempting to rejuvenate themselves, Simon cited the interesting anecdote about how Disney sets aside money to a fund from which some employees can request capital to launch their companies that aim to kick Disney underneath its belt. The assumption naturally is that if you succeed in doing that, Disney will own you and thus learn from it and potentially embrace the disruption you either identified or triggered. As an idea that is brilliant and I think more companies should actively try to spar themselves with these types of initiatives. The most recent example to come to mind is of Mark Zuckerberg making an investment in Diaspora.

The second thing was Simon's comment on how Sky News gives first priority to the time-to-market of news whereas BBC emphasizes qualitative issues and will spend time to double-check stories before running them. The interesting bit here is if you think about how this actually is another situation where the underlying dynamic is that of democratization and giving the people responsibilities and freedom, or in this case that the consumer should do the editorial bit of the news process themselves. Not surprisingly with everything that's floating around on the internet, I guess most are becoming very information-savvy and are, hopefully, able to do basic fact checking and apply common sense to weed through the news. So interestingly this links back to the dynamic where things are getting chopped up into smaller pieces and individuals are becoming more empowered and free.

Amusingly enough I guess neither of these points directly related to the topic at hand, but then again, weak ties are often the source of the most interesting things.

Progression

2011-03-01T21:11:00.000+02:00

Considering that progressive taxes seem to be all the rage right now, I would in fact like to propose a very holistic approach to all of this: instead of using currencies like the EUR, we could instead move to percentages. A bottle of milk would cost 0.1%, for instance. In practice this means that regardless of income, the individual would pay 0.1% of their monthly income for the product.

This type of solution would permanently resolve these pesky issues of some people earning more money than others by ensuring that regardless of the amount of money that a person makes, they will still be able to get the exact same amount of goods or services as any other person.

You learn something new every day

2011-02-28T12:56:00.000+02:00

For a while now I've been somewhat annoyed with the performance of ETFS Crude Oil (CRUD). With the Middle East Revolution Football league (sorry for stealing this) in play and the oil prices rocketing, CRUD has trailed by a fair bit. So what's the problem? Essentially the problem was that by buying it from Germany with a euro denomination, I ended up coupling the oil price to the EURUSD exchange rate. In retrospect my flaw was underestimating the correlation between the two: it appears that every time the oil peaks, people get jittery about the fact that the US is still heavily dependent on the stuff and thus USD dives and eats away at my position.

Having held onto the position for a while, I finally decided that enough is enough and took the small 20% profit and ran. The learnings? With oil, try to decouple the currency from the instrument so you have freedom to time the currency exchanges in the most beneficial way.

(As a side-note, there may as well be other factors in play. I guess I'll need to do some more reading as homework to check out if the phenomenon of contango is in play again with these derivative-based instruments...)

The ultimate overcoat

2011-02-27T13:37:00.000+02:00

I absolutely must have someone tailor me a similar overcoat for next winter.

On politicians and companies

2011-02-12T10:19:00.000+02:00

The parliamentary elections are upon us again, which certainly explains the amount of point gathering that is going on in the press again. Of especial interest to me are the comments that politicians are throwing around about the state of Finnish high-tech industries. They are certainly right: something needs to be done about it if we ever hope to become a world leader in the arena. Because we sure as hell aren't leaders, nor have we truly been leaders.

So, with the latest strategy change done by Nokia, which was widely publicized yesterday, many Finnish politicians are rushing in to say how they will mitigate the amount of unemployment that will arise from these changes, as it is obvious even when observed with your forehead that there are just too many people in the company doing the wrong things. Additionally the center party has been heard to say that they have "started investigating about how this type of structural change (or even crisis) in high-tech sectors can be turned around." Perhaps that's good, but the track record of politicians understanding what's going on and what needs to be done has been so appallingly bad, that I'm not entirely convinced that it's a good idea to have them anywhere near this situation.

What, then, should be done? The politicians seem to think that the software industry should be strengthened and that there will be an ample supply of engineers being freed up from Nokia which can create the software sector. But if we actually look at the situation, we will find that most of the problems that the company has faced over the past decade have been due to software. So I'm sorry if I sound a bit pessimistic, but pray-tell, what are the chances that this bunch is in any way actually competent with software.

The politicians aren't too worried about this. They have also figured out that education always helps, so they have thought up of a brilliant plan of devising new educational venues at which people can be trained in the skills of software. Ugh... I have a bit of a background in software development, even prior to receiving any formal education on it. I tend to agree that higher education in software will widen your thinking, but in actual software business, the best way to learn is by doing it. You don't need formal training for it. Instead, with software I believe that you absolutely need a passion for software: if you never felt like writing software on your spare time or just playing around with code, don't bother wasting precious resources on schooling yourself in software. 9-to-5 coders often end up making more problems than they are able to solve as they easily engineer themselves into a corner, introduce fatal flaws and bugs, and so on.

Then there is the slight problem regarding geographic region: the Finnish market is small and it is so far away from where things happen that it's not even funny. This means that any company wishing to actually grow will need to go abroad, and fast. For a startup this means packing your most extroverted guy in a plane and sending him to London with a suitcase and orders not to come back for the next couple of years. Oh, and the budget, as with startups typically, is shoestring. So it's not a picnic. Combine this with the hostile environment towards entrepreneurial activities in Finland: high taxation, tough labor laws, stigma associated with bankruptcy, difficulty with gaining access to capital (lack of angels and VCs), and the list goes on.

So yes, the politicians can do something, but it is more involved with changing laws and taxation to encourage entrepreneurial activities. The world is already so complex that you cannot merely say that "we will train more software developers!" and hope that the problem is solved. Instead you must carefully craft the boundaries of the system to encourage a certain type of behavior. Shoveling out government resources in the form of cheques to small businesses if they are able to navigate a maze of paperwork is also not good: it's not only one or two startups that I've heard about which have gotten fairly confused regarding who their customer is. In these cases the company has yet to sell anything real to a customer, but the government keeps subsidizing it and giving it more money. This isn't doing anyone a service: if the business plan isn't working out, it's in everyone's best interest to fail fast and move to the next idea. That's what entrepreneurship is about.

And as an interesting side-note, I'm actually starting a process of preparing a paper about these things during the Spring, so hopefully I'll be able to make a clearer argument about what I think the problems are and what should be done about them.

Can you say... Bubble...

2011-02-06T22:42:00.003+02:00

Amusingly enough it's been over three years since this video was made. But with the social buzzword still churning on strongly, can you say... bubble.

Equality

2011-02-03T19:33:00.000+02:00

With the elections just around the corner, the politicians and aspiring politicians are again at their favorite pastime: dividing and distributing other peoples' money. And one of the key themes again this time around is financial inequality, or how money should be moved from the top to the bottom. An interesting thing to think about here is what exactly the problem is and what do we want to solve. Gini coefficients have begun popping up in more international publications, but I can't really recall a single Finnish article mentioning them. Anyway, the basic idea is that a coefficient of 1 implies that 1 person gets all of the income and 0 means that every gets the same amount. With this metric, the inequality in certain regions has increased, but on a global level we've become more equal.

But which is more important: that we all earn the same amount or that the people worst off are supported enough that they are able to survive. I of course have my own strong biases and tend to feel that equal opportunities always beat equal outcomes, i.e. meritocracy is the way to go as long as everyone gets to jump from the same baseline. So in this regard I don't necessarily see high equality as something that is absolutely valuable, as long as everyone is kept in the same boat and not thrown out.

Related to this, another interesting aspect in this is that according to the Economist's recent article, in the US the inequality in the bottom 99% hasn't increased since 1993. This in essence means that what is happening is that the rich are getting richer, but at the same time the poor are also getting richer, although slightly slower. If we also think about the longer term trends, overall the world seems to be slowly becoming a fairer place, as a very significant portion of today's wealthy elite has in fact made their own fortune. And that, in my opinion, is a lot fairer than being wealthy because of the fact that you just happened to have been born into nobility or royalty. What more, the wealthiest people then tend to eventually give most of their money back to society in the form of charitable donations or in other cases by becoming angel investors and pouring their money into high-risk ventures which might otherwise not happen.

So, the name of the game isn't to optimize the Gini coefficient to 0. What more, there is even hardly any solid facts one way or another as to whether equality is that important. And as previously stated, I understand the welfare state as a system which inherently does not take a stance on anything else but ensuring the welfare of the citizens. But welfare shouldn't necessarily be defined to include everything and the kitchen sink, but instead enough to allow a person who has stumbled to still continue living, despite health issues or sudden changes in employment status, or similar situations.

Hope

2011-01-20T01:57:00.003+02:00

Something rotten in the land of Den^W... HR

2011-01-19T23:41:00.000+02:00

There will be no prizes for knowing the three fundamental factors of production, which of course are land, labor, and capital. My background is in software, which as an industry differs mainly from other industries in the sense that it is greatly immaterial, and with the democratization of IT systems, also the capital-related entry barriers have fallen. The implication is clear: anyone with a laptop and a shed can get into the software business, assuming enough competence. This essentially means that out of the three factors above, labor is most crucial. And within labor, one could use the term of human capital as the thing to focus on: you need highly competent and specialized people in order to ship great software.

The above naturally raises human resources to a pedestal and would seem to justify the whole Human Resources discipline, which itself is barely half a century old in the academic sense. Many pure software companies, i.e. companies with their roots firmly in software development, seem to acknowledge this these days. But then there are the other companies. Based on empirical evidence as well as many discussions with friends who have either been part of HR or who have suffered from bad HR in different companies, the conclusion is clear. Something is still fundamentally wrong with how human capital is managed these days in companies.

So, what is the purpose of HR. A quick googling will give us a Wikipedia definition:

... an organization's human resource management strategy should maximize return on investment in the organization's human capital and minimize financial risk. Human resources seeks to achieve this by aligning the supply of skilled and qualified individuals and the capabilities of the current workforce, with the organization's ongoing and future business plans and requirements to maximize return on investment and secure future survival and success.

It thus seems that HR would need to have a fairly good understanding of not only the current, but also the future needs of the company. So HR must be tightly linked to all other functions in a company: business (the bread'n'butter execution stuff), research, corporate-level stuff, etc. This just gives HR a view of the current situation. But the above definition states also that HR should have an intrinsic and very thorough understanding of the corporation's strategy and future directions, so as to be able to pre-emptively attempt to facilitate the future moves of the company and make them as smooth as possible. But let's face it, many HR employees seem to be very detached from business; some even have a certain proudness associated with the fact that they "don't need to understand that nerdy stuff." So unfortunately I remain ever so slightly skeptical of how well a large HR would truly be able to grasp the present, let alone the future, of a business.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the above definition is that HR should attempt to ensure that all employee-related issues are performed in a legal way. Meaning that when team leaders from other units recruit and manage their employees, HR should be there to support and address the needs of the leaders so as to keep everything legal. That is also why strangely enough when layoffs are about HR seems to stroll a nice and neat line of specialists to sit by the table to ensure that everything goes according to protocol. But very often HR also enforces various policies and to an extent restricts the movement of leaders, not because of legal issues, but because of company policies. Which again is fine, as long as the policies are good and can be justified. But as with every other organism, HR tends to have to fight for its survival: it must have a raison d'etre, lest it be relieved of its own headcount. So the incentive to create artificial work and enforce strange policies is there.

But surely HR must have a good deal of role in recruiting new employees? Perhaps, but my hunch is still that it is fairly limited. In interviewing candidates, I just cannot understand HR's role: as was established above, more often than not an HR person has simply no possibility to credibly judge whether someone has the required competences to survive and succeed in certain tasks. The best they can often do here is match the required buzzwords of recruiting leaders to that of the buzzwords in potential candidates' CVs. But this again may be counterproductive: I would much rather interview people whose CVs I personally selected as I am fairly capable of seeing from a CV whether a person might fit the profile regardless of the fact that they might have missed some key buzzwords.

Fortunately these issues have been acknowledged and I've heard of multiple projects where HR has attempted to devise various types of taxonomies for understanding what types of competencies are needed in different roles. My personal favorite story is of a position which required competence number 123: Humor. The person who came up with that certainly had a fair bit of humor. ;)

So yes: human resource management is an important field and the possibilities there are endless. But no, it is very often not done correctly. And in fact in many larger companies Human Resources units are ridiculed for been hives of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and for creating artificial work and hoops through which people must jump. Hopefully a new breed of HR will slowly emerge in the future. A breed that actually understands that human capital is a very critical asset and potentially a great source of competitive advantage. Because as of now, many HR units are merely destroying the competitive advantage...

Autarky

2011-01-08T13:59:00.000+02:00

What is autarky on a personal level? Breaking free from the constraints of gravity.

Bureaucracy

2011-01-03T01:36:00.000+02:00

Preparing for the upcoming elections, I've been trying to get a very rudimentary and basic knowledge of the bureaucratic world which previously has been entirely unknown to me. And to be honest, I'm getting somewhat worried about what the money we pay in taxes is actually spent on and whether or not some serious austerity and axing of budgets and scopes should be in line.

From 2002 to now, the budget of the Finnish government has soared from 35 billion to over 50 billion euros, and the trend is monotonous and rising. This quite a bit higher than what the overall inflation is while at the same time the amount of people employed by the government has remained at roughly at a constant level of about 120 000 individuals. I guess the last part is somewhat comforting, as it implies that at least the headcount isn't out of control. For comparison the municipalities employed about 430 000 individuals in 2004, so if we guestimate the level to have remained somewhat similar, we have over half a million individuals working in the public sectors. Some figures suggest the figure to be even higher at around 700 000 individuals. So for a country of about 5.3 million people, we have roughly 10% of the inhabitants working in the public sector. If we arbitrarily estimate the overall workforce to be e.g. 2.5 million, this is about 20-30% of the workforce. To be fare, I haven't had the time to dig up similar numbers for other countries, so I'm not entirely certain how Finland would fare against them. But just by applying common sense, I have a feeling that that number should be lower.

So the question is two-folded, then: 1) is everything that the public sector is doing absolutely necessary and/or even in the scope of the public sector and 2) could it be done any more efficiently with the proper application of e.g. technology? I have a hunch that if we compare the public sector to a barebones, minimum required set of functions to keep a country running, the current form has organically grown many times over the scope of a minarchist government. And point number two seems like a self-evident thing: public sector differs from the private sector in the sense that whereas private companies operate under the logic of maximizing revenue while minimizing costs to strive for maximum efficiency, the bureaucracies under the government intrinsically do not really have these types of requirements in place. So one thing to think about could be how these bureaucracies could be better incentivized to increase efficiency, since it can't be an impossible thing to do.

Relating to the previous, I also recently ran across the topic of Eurocrat salaries, which gave me quite a fright. I'd never before looked at the salary levels of this bunch, but the levels are quite amazing with the lowest of the low assistants already making around 2 600 euros a month, not including all types of allowances and other perks, which in the case of Finland already boosts it way over 3 000 euros a month and closing in on 4 000 euros at a rapid pace. Factor in the aspect that this group isn't under the normal taxation, the typical Finnish Eurocrat will in fact drag in quite a hefty amount of salary, with the higher echelons of them having a base salary of over 18 000 euros a month, not including allowances and other perks. Of course one could use the counterpoint of how the bureaucratic machine needs to be able to attract the sharpest minds in order to function brilliantly, but my apologies if I'm slightly cynical about the efficiency of even this machine (as an interesting exercise, a quick googling of e.g. "Lady Ashton" shows just some of the redundancy and waste that is going on in the EU).

Granted, this was just a very shallow scratch at the surface and I will need to spend some more time playing around with the numbers, but even this, I think, shows some of the issues associated with public sector spending.

Wikileaks

2010-12-27T15:32:00.000+02:00

I've refrained from commenting too much about the Wikileaks case as honestly I've yet to digest the whole situation. On one hand I laud the transparency that the project has brought and how it is increasingly forcing big governments and big business to think about the ways in which they are conducting themselves. But on the other hand I also acknowledge that whereas in an ideal world we could have complete transparency, in our sub-optimal world many things can be a lot less painful if not done in the open.

From a big business perspective, I have a hunch that this is in fact a good thing. I've long held the view that companies adhere to a rather intuitive life cycle of birth, growing stronger, increasing inertia, and eventually falling. In the ideal case after a company reaches the threshold level of inertia, the resources are merely freed up to do other things in more efficient fashion. And that is natural. The problem often is that once big business reaches a certain size, it is occasionally difficult to let the company fall. And sometimes the companies may even begin to behave irresponsibly by abusing its commanding market position to help it stay competitive.

To tackle the problem of the undead incumbents, we have some authorities, such as the anti-trust authorities who enforce competition laws. They have been, to an extent, fairly toothless in the past. This has naturally enabled some companies and some individuals within companies to behave irresponsibly and do things that they shouldn't be doing. It is to this issue that I feel that the trend of leaking and whistle-blowing could offer a counterweight. If chances of getting caught if you do bad things gets closer to 1 and the penalty is heavy enough, this should be a clear demotivator for companies to behave in anti-competitive ways. And if this in turn helps to revitalize industries and create a level playing field once again, all the better.

I would apply a somewhat similar logic to the governments. It still may not solve the agency problem where big government fails to dismantle unneeded structures to increase available resources only to build more rigid structures on an already a very rigid system. But leaks and whistle-blowing will hopefully make big governments think twice about how to conduct its affairs and whether to engage in activities that cannot stand daylight.

Of course there may be multiple problems with the above. Perhaps the irresponsible people opt instead not to document any bad things they are doing and only rely on word-of-mouth instructions and guidance when coordinating their schemes. And perhaps governments may be less inclined to discuss diplomatic issues if they fear that they can't speak in a direct and frank fashion lest someone gets a hold of the material. But despite this, big business and big government is getting increasingly out of control and the checks and balances mechanisms are either not working or completely nonexistent. So maybe, just maybe, the media will now begin to take a more active role again in keeping these increasingly strong actors on their toes. I would like to think that this will have longer term implications and help bring more health to the whole system, but at the same time I am fearing the worst and thinking that maybe nothing large will change in the long term and that this is just normal oscillation within the system.

Requiem for a Tower

2010-12-23T22:57:00.001+02:00

Rules

2010-12-22T00:32:00.000+02:00

Nicholas Antongiavanni writes the following about how young men should dress:

For it is very ordinary and reasonable that the old should envy the young, to whom it is given to enjoy so many more pleasures, so much more intensely, for so much longer. Truly, we would marvel if they did not envy them. And this envy extends to dress, because old men wish to reserve to themselves the few pleasures which remain to them to enjoy. Thus they get angry when they see young men wearing double-breasted suits and French cuff shirts. It does not seem reasonable to them that young men should enjoy the trappings of eminence before attaining the reality.

He then continues at a later point:

In addition to those modes mentioned above, these especially are to be avoided by the young man: three-piece suits 8especially if the vest is double-breasted), contrast-collar shirts, two-tone or crocodile or anything but solid calf shoes, hats, pocket watches, bow ties, handkerchiefs, bold patterns and bright colors.

But some things are safe ground for young men:

... blazers and khakis, single-breasted suits, plain black shoes, shirts with barrel cuffs and button down collars, striped ties, belts, subtle patterns and somber colors. And if someone should complain that these rules leave him no room within which to make a profession of style but consign him to dreariness, I reply that necessity forces them on him.

Bearing the above in mind and by reflecting against them, I must note that I have scored very badly. Amusingly enough it seems that based on my experiences in Finland, it is the younger folks who tend to be offended by my dress whereas the older people tend to be fairly supportive of proper dress.

But I will concede and leave my elders with the pleasures of wearing hats and pocket watches. As for the other points, everything's fair game...

A trip down memory lane...

2010-12-21T19:42:00.000+02:00

While clearing my closets at work I stumbled on a January 2007 issue of The Economist and got around to browsing through it. Some fun quotes below:

The [American] housing market downswing may not yet be over...

And:

The creation of new instruments, such as complicated derivatives, probably makes that financial system stronger in the long run ... But some of these instruments have yet to be tested by a sever revession or a big corporate default. ... there could be an almighty scrampble for the exits when the trend changes

What does a car sound like?

2010-12-09T14:11:00.000+02:00

Everyone knows that cars have engines and the fast cars have engines that roar. A car sounds like something and the best car geeks can even determine what the engine and thus what the car most likely is based on the noise it emits. Yet now with the emergence of hybrids and electric cars, the sound of the car is changing. Some parties have now started to worry about whether pedestrians are able to hear the cars anymore and if they can't that this would have implications regarding public health.

What's the solution? Well, as they did with the Chicago river, the logical answer is to reverse the flow of the river. Or in this case to make electric cars emit a sound that resembles that of an roaring internal combustion engine. Voila, problem solved!

But seriously, are the guys jumping over the problem a bit too easily? I personally have noticed that it doesn't really matter what the car actually sounds like as most of the time in urban areas where the problem is most frequent, people tend to listen to their music players with noise-canceling headphones. So the problem actually isn't solved and with the increasingly widespread adoption of portable music players, be they iPods or mobile phones, the problem is getting worse, regardless of whether the electric vehicle sounds like a "real" car or not.

Perhaps another approach could be to go back to the drawing board and think about how the fundamental problem could be changed? But then again, I don't perceive it as a problem: if I'm listening to music, I'm still paying attention to the traffic. And as an engineer the idea of making electric vehicles sound like traditional cars is very silly, in my opinion.

Business 101: Finnair

2010-12-07T16:55:00.000+02:00

The employees of Finnair are at it again. This time the flight attendants are on a strike protesting their apparently harsh and cruel working conditions and whatnot. And I'm sure everyone can agree that flying long haul flights requires time to adapt to the timezones and so on. But most people will also acknowledge that the people who have to fly for work will often not get these types of resting times. When the plane lands, off to the meetings you go. So should the flight attendants have their extra time and continue to work 90 hours a month and receive an above average salary (on the Finnish scale)? I don't know, but I do know the following...

Pricing is quite crucial in business. If you price too low, you forgo potential profits. If you price too high, you don't sell. If you price way too low, you sell at a lower price than with which you can sustain the business. Now, the first caveat of pricing is that many people think pricing has something to do with costs. It doesn't. Period. You charge what the customer is willing to pay and you reverse engineer your costs from that amount to see if it's possible to make business out of it. In some cases you will see that even with the highest amounts that you can charge you still can't make up the costs. Hence you should call it a game and move on: there's not business there.

What does this have to do with Finnair or aviation in general? Well, the trend has been changing ever since Southwest came along and made a value innovation and changed the rules of the game. To complement the traditional premium strategies, Southwest created a low-cost competitor: no frills, but the cheapest prices and you still get to go from point A to point B. And lo and behold, there was room in the marketplace for this type of maneuver. This is course leaves the mid-level companies, such as Finnair, in the unfortunate position in which it has to decide what kind of animal it wants to evolve into. The wealthy people will either fly their own planes, charter planes and do the Netjets thing or fly first class in luxury. I on the other hand will optimize the costs associated with the travel and get the cheapest possible ticket. Being in the middle is difficult: you may be able to target the business crowd, but let's face it, in these economic times companies are more than ever before looking at how to reduce travel and where it isn't possible try to get the absolute best rates. It's often cheaper to buy a couple of no frills flights from a low-cost carrier than to get a flexible ticket from the likes of Finnair.

So, the environment has changed and Finnair will need to reinvent itself and think about how to position the company into the marketplace. Based on this, the company will then need to think about its cost structure: if it chooses the low-cost route, the name of the game is scale and minimizing costs as much as possible. Look at Southwest or RyanAir or what have you: standardized fleets, quick turnaround times, optimized costs by flying to remote airports at unattractive time slots to avoid airport fees, and so on. Is Finnair fit to play a game like this? At the current cost structure the answer is definitely not. Can Finnair play the premium game? Well, the premium market in Finland is very limited, i.e. there aren't that many truly rich people (*cough* taxation and the whole shebang). So this may also be a rocky road. And as most people who have flown Finnair will know, the flight attendants never smile. So I'm definitely not going to pay premium prices for grumpy service.

Already the situation is looking quite grim for Finnair. The fact that the different employee groups are trying to suck an already declining company dry may actually be a good thing: my thinking is that the sooner Finnair declares bankruptcy and gets killed off, the sooner we can start from a clean slate and establish a brand new national carrier for Finland which is better positioned in the modern world. This would also take care of the path dependency issues as long as the culture is killed thoroughly enough in the transition. But will this happen? My forecast is no. The Finnish government still has a majority stake in the company and letting a flag carrier fail and at the same time have the staff laid off is something that no politician is willing to do. That is why I am guessing that if the situation gets worse, the government will step in to prop up the company. Mind you, Finnair's brand has already been diluted as a result of the frequent strikes and inability to reliably operate its flights.

So, it doesn't look too promising for Finnair or the tax payers of Finland. The net winners will most likely be the employees in the short-term as they will not need to adapt to the changing world as long as the government continues to bleed money and fight gravity. In the longer term we're all net losers, however, as we are only making a bigger space into the marketplace for foreign competitors to gobble up the space in Finnish aviation and establish routes to compete with the dinosaur that is Finnair. Oh well...

What are you passionate about?

2010-11-30T19:14:00.000+02:00

What are the most interesting discussions you've ever had? Are there any common characteristics for them? And what are the opposites of these? I started thinking about why I can sit and have an endless cup of coffee (nicely emulated by refilling a finite cup over and over, mind you...) with some people and with others I just have an immediate reaction to move on. What is exactly going on here?

My working hypothesis is that it has something to do with passion. Some people are very passionate about something, and with these people the discussion is often interesting if you allow yourself to get immersed into the topic. Others will say that these are annoying people as the ramble on and on about something. But have you actually taken the time to think about all the fascinating aspects of what the other person feels so strongly about? Probably not. And the opposite case where a topic isn't discussed deeply and profoundly, chances are that time just won't fly by. Well, that's not entirely true, of course. There are also the conversations which just seem to fly despite the fact that there isn't any specific passionate topic at hand. Maybe the passion is then for witty remarks and rhetorics, which enables the conversation to flow onwards in an interesting way.

But are there people who aren't passionate about anything? Superficial empirical evidence would suggest so, but I'm not truly convinced. Another argument might be that everyone is passionate about at least one thing and some are passionate about more than one. Perhaps the problem is then about communication, which may either imply that some people are not able to clearly communicate their passion and for reasons unknown choose simply to not engage in a discussion. The other alternative would then be that they may have learned the hard way that others may not always be willing to listen to you or immerse themselves in your interests. I have to admit that I'm not always that keen on immersing myself e.g. on the latest Big Brother setup (which appears to have recently ended, judging by the tabloid papers). But that's something that I should work on changing in myself.

From this then emerges the question of when does the passionate discussion lose its passion and why do some discussions slowly die and become tedious? It might have something to do with relativity: perhaps the dynamic is the same as human satisfaction which appears to be defined as the delta, or the change in something. If you're not moving, you're not happy. Or so it would appear to be in the contemporary western world. Is the analogy then that if the discussion around a certain topic does not constantly attempt to push the boundaries forward and venture into the unknown that it then stagnates and dies out? Sort of like how sharks must keep on swimming lest they want to live.

Maybe this is again one of those topics that would need more thought. It's already clear in the 15 minutes spent to write this entry that the implications for this may be very wide.

Collisions

2010-11-09T10:21:00.000+02:00

I wonder if much of the perceived problems in education and employment might have something to do with friction between planned systems (education) and emergent, free market systems (employment). Hayek might have something to say about this.

Data visualization

2010-11-03T08:01:00.001+02:00

On the state of the church

2010-10-18T08:41:00.000+03:00

Recently the discussion surrounding homosexuality and the church's views was jumpstarted again, thanks to a local talk show. What I can surmise is that some political figures and other extremists from within the Evangelical Lutheran church voiced some anti-homosexual views, which has now resulted in a mass-exodus of people from the church. My own position is that the state cannot under any circumstance discriminate against any group of people based on their gender, religion, sexual preference, or other such criteria. But if a closed group of people, such as a church, decides that they want to adhere to some set of rules but don't break laws or take away the individual's freedom, they're free to do whatever they please. But that's just my view.

The more interesting aspect is that apparently the logic behind the mass-exodus is that people want the church to change its policies. The problem here is that the main fuss was the result of what a politician who holds no position of authority within the church said, and thus it cannot really be interpreted as an official position of the church. I'm not entirely certain, not having seen the program, whether there were any official representatives present and if so whether or not they took any strong stances. But if we assume that the outflow of people consists of disgruntled church members who want to push through a point and get the church to change, then that is precisely the wrong course of action to take. Walking away from the situation does not improve it. Instead it merely takes you out of the situation and indicates that you have given up and don't really think you can make any difference. But still the people are quite vocally complaining about the stances of the church, despite the fact that they walked out...

Now, I'm not really a religious person nor do I really care very much about what the church thinks or what its policies are, as long as they don't severely impede and limit my freedom to act as an individual person. But if I cared and wanted to change the church, somehow I get the feeling that I should actually then try to change the group from within using the mechanisms afforded to me by the agreements made by the members. But if everyone who was disgusted by the comments of certain individuals merely walk out, then by logic wouldn't that leave only the extremists in the church and ultimately result in a tighter-knit group of people who then can freely foster their prejudices and avoid having to change their mindset?

Home ownership

2010-10-11T00:04:00.001+03:00

I am growing fat. Not necessarily physically, but in other respects. In a sense I've been moving more towards a mode of stagnation, having climbed to what appears to be a local maximum, at least for the time being. I have become comfortable and somewhat lazy. And that is a horribly bad thing that must be changed. And change always involves risk, the jump to the unknown.

At this point I must also note that no, I have not purchased a home, unlike the title might suggest. I have, however, been thinking about home ownership. The current situation seems somewhat annoying: prices of homes in Finland have kept at record levels and the new home owner in the capital area will need to lay down closer to a quarter of a million euros in order to get a decent two room apartment at a reasonable location. That's quite steep.

Now, the question that is begging to be asked is whether or not one needs to own their homes. The current culture and the associated norms seem to suggest so: everyone should have a right to own their home. The trends in the western countries have been towards this direction for the past decades. In certain areas for much longer; for instance in the United Kingdom this trend seems to have started with the fall of the aristocracy, which traditionally was the only class being able own land and estates. With the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie the regular man could begin to fathom the possibility of owning property. The fact that property prices have seemed to historically grow rapidly has not really helped the situation: everyone knew up until recently that the price of properties would always go up. In Finland the trend for home ownership is further subsidized by the government, which gives tax rebates to the first home buyers. The signal is clear: the government wants you to own your home. But as the government tends to so often do, it has made a total hash of this as well, as the subsidy tends to go directly into the prices of houses and ultimately push up the already high price level. But the message is still clear.

The collapse of the housing market in the United States, however, tends to send a rather clear message: the direction was not sustainable. So not only does everyone not necessarily need to own their houses, but not everyone deserves to own their houses. In fact, to own your home, you must have income, jobs, and assets. The next question then is whether or not it is even beneficial to own your home. Certainly the world seems like a lot less risky place when you own your home. Especially more so if you've actually paid off your debts. But there as another side to this situation...

Consider the current working life. Job security has been seriously damaged, people are often working fixed term contracts, companies require employees to travel around and become expatriates, and so on. So is your home an asset or a liability? Well, from a flexibility perspective it's in fact quite clear: you are tied down much more if you have invested in owning your own home. Even more so if you have bought your home within the last two years, in which case you will not be able to get rid of your home without tax consequences in the event that you plan to turn a profit from it. So from this perspective you are selling off your flexibility to respond to potentially sudden opportunities. Also, by owning your own home, the emotional bond is that much stronger to the place you occupy. Having the sell your house, as some people who have been laid off have had to, is a bigger personal loss than merely deciding to terminate your contract and renting a new place.

It is very unlikely that we will return to an era of high job security. One of the competitive advantages for the future employees in the search for jobs is precisely the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. And because this is the case, I am becoming increasingly certain that in the foreseeable future there is no point for me to tie my assets down in the form of housing property. That would be merely handicapping myself when I have already determined a very real need to slim myself down and regain my flexibility and begin to move more aggressively into uncharted territories.

Things that annoy me today

2010-10-07T10:57:00.001+03:00

People who wear shoes that go SLAPSLAPSLAPSLAP when they walk. Buy proper shoes and learn to walk.
People who are either so lazy or so dumb that they cannot understand that if you need to classify P1, P2, ..., Pn into categories I1, I2, ..., In, E where it is trivial to check if Pn doesn't belong in In still place certain Ps into In despite the fact that anyone can see with their forehead that that is not the case.
People who use read receipts (aka the "kyylätäppä") in emails.
People who think that it's credible to state that it is possible to do 24 person months of work in 6 months.
People who don't respect your calendar and still try to book meetings despite the fact that you have explicitly declared that you're busy.
People who call wrong numbers.

And many other things, but those were the ones that came to mind after about 27 seconds of thinking. But on the other hand, the things that I like at this precise moment:

The autumn and the way how the leaves in the trees are turning to different shades of red and brown. That's cool.

Courtesy & etiquette in regards to calls

2010-09-22T13:23:00.000+03:00

Etiquette has historically dictated to a great extent the way people should behave in different situations. With the advent of casual Fridays and mobile phones, it seems that we have more or less rid ourselves of this type of guiding material. Which is a shame...

Most recently I overheard a person explain to another person whose phone was ringing that by pressing the button labeled as "Silence" the user of the phone could choose to not respond to the call, but not hang up the ringing. In effect the caller would then just wait for an arbitrary amount of time before either hanging up or leaving a message. Analogically the situation is same as if the recipient of the call had not noticed that someone was calling.

In my opinion that type of behavior is blatantly rude and arrogant. My personal policy is to answer calls if possible. If answering isn't possible, then I hang up the call with the red button, which gives a clear signal to the caller that their call was acknowledged by not taken, instead of leaving them wondering if the recipient didn't hear the phone or whether they are just ignoring the caller. I also attempt to immediately follow up with an SMS stating that I cannot answer at present but that the person can send me a message or if it is a matter of life and death, call again. If the person calls again, then I will answer the call.

The logic, from my perspective, is very simple and at least I feel that the above method is polite to all parties involved. I do not leave calls unanswered or unacknowledged just because I can, because it is not polite. But if I am otherwise engaged, e.g. having lunch with someone, I do not interrupt the engagement unless there is a heavy enough reason to do so, at which point you of course apologize for the fact that you absolutely must take the call.

That's just of course my take on the subject...

Less than two weeks to go...

2010-09-21T18:28:00.004+03:00

On financing studies

2010-09-12T01:56:00.000+03:00

The discussion around students and whether or not the subsidies they receive rages on again in Finland. One Finnish blog posting by a local student politician went on to complain about how "students are one group of people who are forced to fund their life with debt." Apparently this was a reply to some other comments, which supposedly suggested that students were taking too long to graduate and that "25 year olds are able to get subsidies while doing just about nothing."

Currently the situation is that Finnish students get a 298 euro subsidy from Kela for studies. Additionally Kela subsidizes living costs by 80% and up to 201.6 euros per month. Additionally the state ensures that each student is able to get an additional 300 euros of loans per month. So for an average student living in an apartment that costs over 252 euros a month in rent the state shells out 499.6 euros and an additional 300 euros in guaranteed loans. Students are also eligible for student housing, which is apparently roughly ~200-300 euros for shared apartments (students get their own rooms and share common facilities) or ~300-400 euros for studio apartments. Assuming that the student uses the exact 252 euros for housing, that means that from the 499.6 euros they will have 247.6 euros or 547.6 euros with the debt. With this type of setup the student is allowed to have incomes of up to 11850 euros per year, meaning that if the student studied full time and worked only during the three months of summer vacation, they would be allowed to earn a monthly salary of up to 3950 per month. Or if spread out evenly over the year, the student could earn 987.5 euros per month.

So, assuming that the student is able to employ themselves so that they earn the maximum of 11850 euros per year, it means that in total, including the debt, they are able to accrue 19046.4 euros per year, or an average of 1587.2 euros per month from which they still have to pay all costs of living, including housing.

Alternatively, if we assume that a student is able to tackle a job that pays 10 euros an hour and works 10 hours a week through the semester and 37.5 hours a week during summer, then the income would be 3600 euros during the semester and 4500 euros during summer for a total of 8100 euros of auxiliary income and an average of 1274.7 euros per month including subsidies and debt.

The student gets the above mentioned subsidies for 9 months every year, meaning that in 5 years time they will have used up 45 months of subsidies and accrued 13500 euros of debt (not including interests). At this point of time the student is eligible for tax deductions of 3300 euros as they were able to graduate on time. This essentially means that on graduation, the student now has 10200 euros of debt.

At this point I'm starting to wonder what all the complains are about. If you are willing to put in a bit of work, you are able to get a decent standard of living during your studies while accruing a relatively modest sum of debt. Sure, some may argue that the above scenarios are unrealistic. In my personal experience, for instance, I have entirely foregone state subsidies after my first ~year and a half of studies and financed my studies through working first part-time and then full-time and as of now it appears that I will be graduating in about 6.5 years. Out of those 6.5 years I've worked full time for about four years. During that time I have not accumulated any debt from studies. This may again be slightly unfair as I may be an outlier, but it just goes to illustrate that there are many different possibilities to finance one's studies.

Overall, however, even in the above scenarios, the student should be fairly well able to live off of the current system and further increase their level of living with a minimal amount of work. Even if the student takes the maximum amount of debt, the result is relatively small and the state continues to subsidize through tax discounts. Now, considering that studies are typically an investment in yourself which in turn offers a wider array of choices in regard to lines of work and also often increase your ability to earn money in the future, it still seems a relatively simple choice.

And regarding debt, there are again a few ways to look at it: if you don't want to finance your studies with debt, there are other alternatives as well. Then again, putting up some debt is a good statement in regards to commitment to your studies.

... makes the world go round

2010-09-11T18:52:00.001+03:00

I recently popped by New York and one thing was blatantly obvious: the correlation between the size of cities and the affluence of the top tier is quite clear. New York's club scene is a case in point of how money talks and the rules of the game are clear: the clubs are there to maximize their profits. Which isn't really that big a surprise, I guess.

Another interesting aspect related to that was the dynamic with which clubs in the big world operate. To maximize money, you need to maximize the amount of affluent customers who are willing to shell out money. And that typically still means men. So as a man, you can essentially bring two things to the club: money or women. If you bring money, you better bring a hefty pile of it. If you bring women, they better be quite the lookers. The women are actually quite obvious, since naturally the wealthy men will like to be surrounded by beautiful women. And to get things going, men will have to show their colors by shelling out as much cash as possible to get the most expensive bottles. This then naturally attracts the women, who will tend to flock towards these tables either because they are gold diggers, or because they were already paid to do that.

Naturally this dynamic can be ruined if the average material in the club makes the club less desirable. So groups of men need not bother unless they are prepared to drop a thick wad of cash. Interestingly enough this dynamic isn't as present in Finland as it is in London, New York, and other big cities. The conclusion to draw from here is that Helsinki obviously isn't a big city or there aren't that many young and affluent people in Finland. Or both, which is very likely the case. This is, I guess, supported by a recent statistic that an average customer in the night will drop about 20 euros of cash per night, which is two or three orders of magnitude different than the wealthiest customers in the more exclusive clubs of the biggest cities in the world.

Another interesting thing is that despite the whole discourse on gender equality seems to have left the dynamics of the night very much untouched. Sure, some will argue that women on average have the upper hand when it comes to power, but in the more exclusive settings it is still the dollar that has the last say. Which is best illustrated by a question on Craigslist a fair while back in which a girl from NYC was asking about how he might go about bagging an affluent hedge fund manager. The response was that the setting should be looked at as a deal: the girl has nothing to give but her looks, which are melting away, while the guy has status, wealth, and power, which will keep on growing unless he fumbles. So ultimately the girl will want to bag the manager while the manager will want to only lease the girl for a certain while, until he can upgraded to next year's model. Which I guess is precisely how the world works in some circles.

Then, what is left at the end of the day in terms of lessons? Well, for me the very positive realization is that I'm in fact very happy with my life. I can enjoy myself by observing these types of dynamics at play while at the same time being satisfied by knowing that I don't need to partake in these games. And that's a really comforting thing to know.

Energy

2010-08-22T23:06:00.001+03:00

Sampo Pankki...

2010-08-19T15:49:00.000+03:00

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

2010-08-17T00:15:00.000+03:00

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

2010-08-07T15:22:00.000+03:00

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.

Jobs and ethics

2010-07-19T09:58:00.000+03:00

I was recently approached by a bank who's customer I am as they wanted to have a meeting to talk about thing, mainly about selling me all types of products. The meeting itself was rather interesting, as they had supplied me with some barely 20-year-old girl to sell cards and mutual funds and whatnot. Naturally she may not have had too much clue about what she was in fact selling or how ("You appear to pay currently 40e per year for this card and 0.5e per month for this other, if you pay us 5.7e per month, you'll get both..."), but this raised some questions about the ethics of doing business...

In this specific case besides the blatant problem of attempting to overcharge (especially as a different bank has already given me everything she was offering for free...) there is a question whether or not the bank would've looked out for my interest. Naturally I'm not a big customer, so I don't get to talk to the more experienced people, but trying to sell me some obscure mutual fund which invests into other funds with a distribution of 25% to stock funds and 75% into bond funds at a time during which we have the whole Greek situation going on with an argument that the fund has made 13% since last summer is questionable (just for record, comparing with a year back, I guess the only possible way to have actually lost money would've been to invest in NOK...). When asked about this, the bank's representative didn't really appear to be too much on the map. Neither when I asked her if she actually understood about all the hidden costs associated with her product (the answer was: "But it's free, there's no fee!").

But, this still begs the question of ethics and looking out for the customer's interest. Lack of knowledge is something that I don't like at all and if you sell me something, you're in a really sticky spot if you insist on knowing something that you in fact don't. That's just dangerous and not looking out for my interest. There's of course the separate case where the seller might in fact know better but doesn't care about me. For these cases I suggest you to read about the behavior of bankers during the 1980s in Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. Business is business, but still...

This got me also thinking a bit about myself. What do I in fact know about my line of work and is it beneficial for my employer, my customers, or the society at large? I guess the scary answer is that I don't know. I would like to think so, but I'm not entirely convinced. But I do think about it and try to understand the world a bit more and based on my studies, there are certainly many cases where standards are beneficial for the customers and society. Are they always beneficial for the company? It depends...

Oh, and a final note, the meeting with the bank did go decently well. I reduced all of my costs to zero while retaining essentially the same products. Which is nice.

Inches

2010-07-08T19:59:00.001+03:00

Dreams

2010-07-02T08:16:00.001+03:00

Overconsumption

2010-06-29T13:53:00.000+03:00

“The wealthy are spending more now simply because they have more money. But their spending has led others to spend more as well, including middle-income families. If the real incomes of middle-class families have grown only slightly, how have they financed this additional consumption? In part by working longer hours, but mainly by saving less and borrowing more.”

That's borrowed from Krugman's slides, who in turn attributes that to Robert Frank. That may very well be true, judging by personal experience. I still maintain that it's ok to have variable costs with a more or less wide variance as long as you can control it, if need be, and also keep your fixed costs under tight control.

Zagat for Finland

2010-06-28T23:03:00.000+03:00

I've recently fallen in love with one of the more useful "Web2.0" applications around here in Finland which is aptly called eat.fi. The concept is very simple and very old: rate restaurants. And as is all the rage, then there's the possibility to meta-rate. But all in all the whole setup is as simple as can be, and what more, it solves a practical problem and question for me: where should I eat today?

As a consumer I'm fairly in line with your typical Finn. I do get very annoyed very quickly if things don't go right in a restaurant, be it an improperly prepared dish or incompetent waiting staff. But I seldom take it out on the staff, preferring instead to send feedback directly to the upper echelons of the restaurant, if at all possible. In my view this cuts through the crap and takes the problem directly to the people who need to be aware of it: the upper levels of the company, perhaps even the owners. What is the point of giving feedback to a waitress who may not necessarily be too receptive towards criticism from a random customer when instead you can reflect a bit about what exactly happened and then try to offer a bit of analysis to the leadership of the company. I also don't typically attach my details to the feedback as I don't really want to appear like the type of guy who would be fishing for compensatory gifts from the company. It's enough that I've hopefully raised some points and in the future the restaurant is able to function better.

But with eat.fi, the whole eating experience has in fact gotten another dimension altogether: the social aspect. Not only do I finally have the possibility of publicly giving praise for places I like, but I can also find the people who appear to like similar places as I do and follow their ventures. And I must admit that the whole concept of meta-ratings makes sure that instead of deteriorating to a rant, I instead try to keep the feedback brief, simple, and as objective as possible. Oh, and I like points.

But yeah, long story short, I'm absolutely hooked on the system and my account is available here. If you're also a member at eat.fi, drop me a line.

Meet Ari Gold

2010-05-24T21:11:00.002+03:00

Ages and roles and the Marine Corps

2010-05-20T22:35:00.000+03:00

As has been the theme for this Spring, I've been thinking about what is wrong with big companies. Another aspect that came to mind is the age old dynamic between young and old people: young people think older people are complete fossils and the old people think the younger people are obnoxiously arrogant and don't respect age. But the thing is that the last couple of generations of work force are part of a very fundamental shift in technology, which can be shortly characterized as the first time in history when technology life cycles have become shorter than the working lives of people. What this in practice means that your technical skills will be significantly outdated well before you ever reach retirement.

In practice this is quite obvious if you look at technological evolution. Agricultural technology took a lot longer to become widespread than the printing press, which in turn had a longer life cycle than the steam engine, which in turn was outpaced by radio technology, and so on leading up to the niches of today's IT world. To put it blatantly, I'm twentysomething and I've already sort of fallen out of the cutting edge of technological evolution that I once was very much into. In the current world of the world wide webs, cycles are measured in years, at best, and in months at worst. So while all of the above might not necessarily be exactly accurate enough to be an academic thesis, the trend is still clear.

This in fact led me to think about how different people create value. As an analogy I started thinking about a friend of mine who plays floorball very actively and is apparently quite good at it. The situation that he is encountering is that now that he's about 30, he can no longer keep up with the young guys. So instead he has to start playing with more intelligence. I also get the impression that he also brings a lot of spirit into the team and is in fact very crucial in fostering the team spirit and acting as an "older brother". So in brief, the value add that he brings is different from the value add that the 20-year-old guy brings to the team.

Related to this, I was recently skimming over the US Marine Corp's document named MCDP 1: Warfighting. It is a very interesting read and one of the things that I think fits here nicely is the concept of different levels of war, which range from strategic to operational to tactical. In brief, the strategic level is focused on the question of how to win wars. The operational level in turn focuses on how to win campaigns, while the tactical level addresses how to win battles. So if we apply this type of approach in a very raw fashion to the floorball analogy and ages, we might get something like the following situation: the 20-year-old guy operates on the tactical level, i.e. how to win over the ball and score goals. The 30-year-old guy operates on the operational level and works on keeping the spirits up, the team functioning during the match and is ultimately looking at how to win games. Then, the coach, who I guess can be of various ages but for the sake of discussion is now 40, then operates on the strategic level and is focused on how to win the whole season.

So it's clear that the value add that each of these guys brings to the table is fundamentally different and is based on each one's intrinsic capabilities, which are also very much tied to age. The 20-year-old guy is often very self-centered and focuses on shorter time horizons (take it from someone who is still twentysomething... :). The 30-year-old is getting into the family-fostering mode, to be provocative. While the 40-year-old is slowly starting to realize that if he wants to leave behind any type of legacy, then now is the time to start doing so or else it's not going to happen. But these guys can't generally operate very efficiently on each others' levels as they don't have the capabilities for that. And there's nothing wrong with that, because everyone is still needed.

Now, how does this in any way relate to big companies? Well, in big companies it's not so different: recent graduates are very keen on technology and represent the running power of the athlete and are able to do the heavy lifting. Slightly older guys in turn have slightly more perspective and experience and while no longer representing the cutting edge of technology, they might still be able to contribute by being efficient in managing the younger guys and pointing them in the right direction while being able to support and serve their subordinates in their daily jobs. And eventually we should ideally have people who have seen how the world works, have become the statesmanlike leaders that the world needs and are still able to stand solidly enough to keep things sane (we younger guys tend to like to run very fast and if we're not careful, we often just run for the sake of running and occasionally in the wrong direction). But again, to overly simplify the situation, these roles and the types of people may have difficulty operating on the wrong levels.

The problem, then, is when this nice and neat theoretical approach doesn't work out in practice. You have the middle-aged guy who is painfully outdated technologically trying to keep up in the role that's in fact meant for the twentysomethings. Or when a recent graduate is thrown into the difficult task of making longer-term strategic decisions without the capabilities and the experience of truly understanding or appreciating the complexity and trickiness of the task at hand. And this, I argue, is one large problem in large incumbent companies. How should one solve this, then? That's a completely different question and hopefully the statesmanlike leaders are able to solve that question. Because I sure can't...

Why some people play with sharp knives...

2010-05-17T01:12:00.000+03:00

By talking to a couple of people who have practiced Krav Maga for quite a while I heard of an interesting trend: at some point people tend to start practicing with sharp, real knives. I talked about this with other people and most of them held the view that it is incredibly stupid to do something like that as the probability of something bad happening in the form of an unintentional accident increases dramatically. However, reading a paper by Chet Richards had an interesting quote from Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, which actually sheds some light on this:

Most warriors only perform tricks … In order to understand life and death, you must actually be in a situation where the possibility of death exists ... Through constant practice, you become free of your own ideas of what and how things should work

It actually makes sense...

On gifts

2010-05-11T00:32:00.002+03:00

The culture of gift giving is a very fascinating thing: while the fundamental ideas are good, I keep getting a strong feeling that nowadays it is dominated by selfishness and self-entitlement: people are no longer pleasantly surprised by gifts but instead they implicitly expect and demand them. Nowhere is this more evident than in weddings, where I guess traditionally the concept was to help the new couple create their new home. But times change and these days couples that are getting married often already have been living together for a while and thus the need for cutlery and coffee machines should have been satisfied. But lo and behold, these days we have interactive gift lists with detailed descriptions and specifications for what is expected and acceptable to the couple. Or if you don't find anything from the list that you want to give, don't just wing it but instead give cold hard cash...

Somehow these types of things annoy me incredibly: I give gifts if I feel like giving them. If someone is demanding something from me, I don't typically give it to them merely on the grounds of them demanding it. And when friendships and relationships are in question, demanding material is in my opinion very much questionable.

Now, another funny aspect of the dominant demand-culture is that if you actually look at only the cash flow, it's a silly cycle of people sending money between themselves. While thinking about this topic, I browsed over some blogs and comments where people were giving out all types of guidelines about how much cash they typically give if they attend the wedding and how much if they don't attend. Then there are the people who motivate the discussion by noting that they do demand gifts and money because they have given gifts and money, which just results in this cycle. Money is good as you can shuffle it back and forth, but for some odd reason these same people tend to dislike it if they have given you a gift and you give it back to them when they have a celebration.

What I typically do during Christmas, for instance, is that if A gives me chocolate (C1) and B gives me chocolate (C2), I just act as a proxy and give A the C2 chocolate and B the C1 chocolate. If I get chocolate from more people, then I just hand them out in a random fashion back to the people. That way everyone is happy and I, not liking huge amounts of chocolate, don't get stuck with any useless stuff.

At this point I guess I should just say it out loud very clearly: I do not want or expect presents. If you must give me something, please donate to some good cause and tell me about it. It's a lot more useful than filling my already small apartment with all sorts of crap that I don't need. Alternatively if you don't want to help charitable foundations and still want to give me something as a present, please call me and I'll tell what equities you can purchase and transfer under my name to complement my existing investment portfolio.

Mission statements

2010-05-04T22:05:00.000+03:00

Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.

Well, maybe not. But visions and missions are in fact important. And doing the properly is bloody difficult... (And the above is from Max Barry's brilliant book, Company.)

Small cap, medium cap, large cap

2010-05-03T10:19:00.000+03:00

If big company executives aren't necessarily a good fit for small companies and if small companies are the ones driving the change and the big companies need to change, does the big company executive have any role in a changing organization?

Of course, but Ben Horowitz has an interesting blog post about the mismatches between big company execs and small companies. I was just thinking a couple of steps ahead and wondering if the big companies should bring in small company executives to drive the change. A provocative thought...

Eating out

2010-05-01T13:23:00.000+03:00

In the past half a decade I can trace a very clear trend in regards to eating out. During my time as a freshman eating out was something that you did out of necessity: I am incredibly bad at cooking and I had to get food somewhere. It had to be cheap and there had to be lots of it. The typical student strategy, which more often than not resulted in government subsidized student meals twice a day, once at 10.30 when the restaurants opened and another time at 18:00 just before the restaurants closed. In retrospect the food was horrible but I survived.

Eventually your income starts rising and quality of life improving. As a proxy of this phenomenon someone once suggested the size of your stomach: you must be wealthy if you can afford to be fat. That may have worked in the era when only wealthy people could avoid manual labor and grow fat off of their capital income. But, for me the increases in income resulted in middle-of-the-road dining experiences. Chain restaurants. Bad service, mediocre food, and extraordinarily astronomical prices compared to what you got. So in a way this was not my finest hour, but something necessary to learn a bit more about how the world works: there are too many fools that can be ripped off by restaurant chains that play the volume game.

As is typical, after the dark ages people start getting wise again. And in my case my renaissance began when a couple of lawyers provided dinner at Chez Dom. I got interested and checked out the prices, and lo and behold, they were not even that bad. Nowadays a two Michelin star restaurant will serve you lunch for 30 euros: amuse-bouche and three courses. Relatively speaking a fair bit more expensive than your typical 10 euro lunch, but in absolute terms not that horrible. And this was the crème de la crème of Helsinki, mind you.

So, since then I've changed my strategy in regards to eating out. If I'm just hungry, I typically keep a mental list of the places with the cheapest prices for the most amount of food with the boundary condition of a certain threshold in regard to the quality of food (the "no frills" strategy, so to say). And then I have a separate list of places where I will eat if I eat out with other people. The common aspect for those places is that none of them is a chain restaurant, none of them is in the absolute high-end category, but just below (the best is if you are able to find a restaurant that is destined to get their star, but hasn't gotten it yet, so the price point is still slightly lower but the food and service is fantastic). And interestingly enough more often than not the prices are in fact only marginally higher than with chain restaurants and the other places that rip off ignorant middle classes.

And as a result, I can finally say that I am eating better than ever and at a fraction of the cost that I thought this type of life style would require. Unfortunately many people don't see the above dynamic about how middle-of-the-road restaurants rip you off and how much you could better your experience with a marginal increase to the cost. This ignorance also shows up in other aspects of certain people from this group, namely the inability to handle simple processes like reserving tables, arranging dinners, and so on. Fortunately we all have the possibility of choosing who we eat out with and who we engage with. Thank god.

On rejuvenating a company

2010-04-28T18:33:00.000+03:00

As has been noted before, my recent interest revolves around aspects of evolution, especially that of industries and companies. Again, the age-old question of why companies die and how that can be avoided remains something of a key question.

Interestingly enough a few months back I was listening to Aubrey de Grey talk about aging and the provocative thought of near-eternal life. The argument supposedly goes metabolism causes unwanted side-effects (or damage) in our bodies over time. Eventually due to the accumulation of damage we end up dying, which on an individual level can be a rather unpleasant experience, depending on circumstances. Anyway, the idea is that by repairing the damage periodically we can rejuvenate the body and in a way turn back the clock. Advances in technology paired with iterative rejuvenation should then result in a situation where we would supposedly escape death indefinitely.

Regardless of whether or not we believe de Grey, I see an interesting analogy between this and what is killing off companies. If we start from a small start up, typically things are very ad hoc and agile, unorganized and clear. With a small amount of people making up the company, things just work. Of course this structure is very fragile and susceptible to all types of problems due to the lack of experience, much like children. The company can stray from its path and end up killed by being run over by competition. But such is life.

Over time the companies that aren't killed get smarter and smarter. They learn how to survive, how to satisfy customers, and so on. The growth is thus happening and typically in order to get the revenue to grow, companies need to scale up and thus recruit new employees. Over time the company must put on some excess weight, or overhead, in the form of administrative roles and structures (e.g. reporting structures, organizational structures, etc.). The structures typically appear to solve some problem. Reporting structures attempt to solve the problem of communication, which arises when enough people work in an organization and it is no longer feasible or possible to have everyone talking to everyone. So, structures in a way should be subordinate to problems.

With size and wealth comes relative stability. A single failure might no longer cause death and the company also learns to view and evaluate the world (or the industry it operates in, which is pretty much the same thing in this case) from the perspective of survival: the organization has learned from past mistakes. Enter path dependence and the increasingly heavy bag of history. Culture and status quo forms and the company keeps growing. Implicit knowledge is taught to new employees and the culture grows. People start doing things in a certain way since that's how it has always been done. The structures solidify and become axiomatic.

Unlike humans who grow and function in a more or less unchanged environment (where the change is so slow that it does not matter from the perspective of an individual human), companies operate in a much more unstable environment. Thus as the market demand changes, the companies must evolve to address new situations. Humans very often don't need to do this: the sun rises tomorrow, much like it did today. But the company must change, it must act differently at different parts of an industry's life cycle. The structures which served one purpose need to be changed to accommodate the changing environment. But as the structures become more and more rigid, change becomes more difficult. Inertia creeps in and damage begins to build up. Eventually if the company isn't able to reinvent or rejuvenate itself, it dies.

I'll admit that the analogy isn't perfect, but the parallels are surprisingly much aligned. Now, what is the practical implication? The older the company, the fatter the organization, the more unable it is to change and eventually it will get killed off, either by its own inability to function or alternatively it will get eaten up by the new breed of predators. Some people have argued that action comes from structure, and if we accept this, then its clear that to get different action the structure must change. So thus, to put it very bluntly, the rejuvenation of the company means the breaking of existing structures to build room for new structures.

First impressions

2010-04-05T22:52:00.000+03:00

I recently had a learning experience interviewing people for a job. It was my first experience with something like that and what a learning experience it was to sit on the other side of the table and look at the situation from a completely different perspective. I thought that I would try to summarize some key things to keep in mind if and when I'm on the "regular" side of the table again in the future...

1) First impression matters. Exclamation mark. Seriously, it's a cliche, but I would say that judging by my experience it held very much true. The impression that I got from the first few minutes would typically hold true for the entire course of the interview. So try to get that right.

2) Be prepared and have your papers in order. Due to various reasons I didn't have the possibility to get very much acquainted with the CVs in advance, so it would be beneficial to bring a complete set of all relevant documents to the interview. If you intend to show something, be prepared in advance; asking the interviewer to lend you a laptop for showing something from online is somewhat awkward.

3) Answer the questions. It was quite surprising to me to run across some cases where people wouldn't answer the question they were asked. They would instead circle around the question. If you don't know the answer, the next best thing from my view would be to admit it. If you may have some clue, you could open up your thinking by explaining out loud, but in this case it should be clear where you're going with your answer. As a spin off of this, know what you know and more importantly know what you don't know. Trying to bluff the interviewer is hazardous: it is very much possible that the interviewer will know more than you and if you get caught bluffing, that is not good.

4) Open questions are a lot more fun for the interviewer. If, however, the interviewer starts asking simple and direct, closed questions, this may potentially be a bad sign. In my case once I didn't get satisfactory answers for open questions and I needed to just see if the interviewee knew anything of the subject, I would narrow my questions and form them more like exam questions and ditch the discussion or dialogue approach.

5) Be active. If the interviewer needs to drag out all the bits and details from you, it reflects somewhat badly on the perception that people are getting from you: are you really the go-getter type of person? Ask questions, show interest.

I guess there were also other things I noticed, but these were some of the top things that came to my mind. Now that I've written them down on paper, most of them seem like common sense. And I guess they are precisely that.

A short introduction to investment banking...

2010-03-31T00:26:00.002+03:00

On human capital

2010-03-28T19:39:00.000+03:00

Being in a happy position of still retaining the title of student I've been able to talk to a fair amount of different companies and their representatives. On top of the network of people who you've sat with and solved differential equations in Mat-1.1120 also talk a bit about where they've ended up and what they're doing. The insights about how the market and employers work is a rather illuminating experience and it seems that the age old rules of thumb still apply...

Some say that if you truly want to learn, go to a small company or start your own. You get your hands dirty and learn by doing. The salaries aren't that great, but you get a sense of accomplishment when you ship something to the customers or finish a project and see how you've made a tangible difference somewhere. It's also a world where bullshit doesn't fly; the small companies don't have the luxury of employing the standard mid-level management. If it doesn't contribute to the bottom line in one way or another, it won't fly.

On the other end of the scale we have the multinationals. Compared to the startups the difference is drastic: you actually get paid every month regardless of the financial success of your company, which is sort of cool. The nature of the game also changes: you start doing more abstract things and at times it may not even be clear who exactly is paying your salary and why they are doing so. But it enables you to spend a lot more time just thinking about things instead of having to run around trying to ensure that the company will survive next month as well, which is often the top priority in smaller companies.

Salary-wise it's actually interesting. I guess with large companies the salaries follow a bell curve with the average being some decent middle-class figure. The start-up world in turn may also follow a bell curve, but the average is way lower and the variance is very much higher: you get shitty salary but if things go will, your equity stake will be worth a nice and tidy sum... Something that doesn't typically happen in the Fortune 500 companies. Or that's anyway the feeling I had. Recently I've started to think that maybe even the large companies are not that uniform: some get a totally shitty salary, more people get a decent salary, then there's a gap, and finally the few get paid enormous amounts in various types of compensations.

But the practical implication, then, is the age old notion that if you want to do cool stuff, go start companies or join small companies. You won't necessarily get great financial rewards, but it'll be pretty goddamn fun. If, on the other hand, you want to be sure that you'll never make a difference in anything but aren't hanging by a thin thread either, go to a big company.

The question is thus the following: having experienced both worlds, which one do I actually want to belong to? The sense of accomplishment is far greater in the startup world, but the big companies are places where you can grow old and fat without having to really worry about anything...

Speed of technology cycles and process/product innovation

2010-03-11T10:16:00.000+02:00

The speed that new technology emerges has been speeding up over the course of our history with the reasons being plentiful. The idea in essence is that for instance writing took pretty darn long to emerge in its current form and be widely adopted throughout the world, but for instance computers went through the same cycle in a fraction of that time. I don't have the references off the cuff now, but I recall running across some papers on this issue a year or few back.

Recently I've also had to go back to basics and read a bit of Utterback and Abernathy, and other such guys, on industry evolution, ecology, and the whole shebang. Well, ok, Utterback and Abernathy looked at the swings between process and product innovation, and the simple thought from that is well summarized in Nelson's paper from 2001: product innovation is driven by the amount of firms in an industry, process innovation by the size of firms. In practice this means that when an industry or technology is emerging, small entrants are plentiful and thus product innovation is abound. Then when dominant designs begin emerging some companies fare better than others and thus we get big companies. Or alternatively existing big companies enter the industry. The end result anyway is that the competitive advantage shifts to process innovations as the big companies tend to be good at throwing resources at things and developing processes. Scale benefits and such then ensure that small companies either exit or gravitate toward non-mainstream niches.

But what if you lump these two things together? Technology cycles become shorter, thus meaning that the time window for big companies to reap benefits based on process innovations is shortened (I guess that product innovation cycles will also shorten, but I think the point is that to have relevant process innovation, you first need a product and the business, otherwise it's pointless). Will this, then, imply that big companies will be at an increasing disadvantage because of their inertia and inability to perform product innovations, at least on the level that start-ups can? And will this, then, imply that from an evolutionary perspective the days of the big companies are outnumbered?

Books and covers

2010-03-07T22:03:00.000+02:00

I ran across Fantastic Plastic Machine quite some years ago, mainly by stumbling on the first track of FPM's third album, Luxury. The track was quite aptly named Theme of Luxury, which I fell in love with right from get-go. Trying to describe it would only discredit it. Yes, it's that good. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the rest of the album was, well, very different. As a matter of fact the album itself is as eclectic and diverse as they come. So I was somewhat disappointed with the album and it has been lying around ever since. Well, up until recently, anyway, when I finally picked it up again and started to listen to it, and lo-and-behold, it is in fact very good.

I guess the underlying dynamic here is that based on the first track, I was expecting something. The album didn't deliver that, and that was the letdown. But what it does deliver is something else, which is equally good, just different. It's like picking up the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and finding out it reads like The Economist. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Tuition fees

2010-03-05T00:31:00.001+02:00

We've traditionally had free university in Finland, meaning that in practice students do not pay for their education. This system has essentially afforded equal opportunities for people regardless of socio-economic background to educate themselves in universities. Now, recently there's been talk of introducing tuition fees in Finland. This presentation made by a group doing a report for the government would suggest a yearly fee of 1000 euros per student, translating to an extra 250 million euros of income per year for the education system (calculations done by Helsingin Sanomat). The rationale behind this move would be to get students to graduate faster as well has help in hiring new faculty, and so on.

Technically the goals of this initiative sound good: who wouldn't want to graduate faster and have more faculty per student than before. However, this somewhat undermines the free education principle. Some people stand very firmly behind the principle, but I don't consider myself as much of a hardliner on this issue. From a practical standpoint, however, I'm am somewhat worried about this turn of events: if the system was working and someone could guarantee that the extra 250 million would be spent wisely and would in practice improve the quality of education, I wouldn't necessarily be that much against it. But I fear that the extra money wouldn't matter; it would be squandered on pointless exercises and real tangible value would fail to materialize for the students.

Aalto University, the merger between Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and the University of Art and Design Helsinki, promised lots of new and unique opportunities for students. The jury is still out on this one, but as far as I'm concerned this seemed precisely like an exercise that could bring synergies via increased economies of scale: reducing overlapping functions and bureaucracy and refocusing the left over resources on improving quality. Instead my current feeling is that this isn't happening. I don't have any hard evidence, but I have a feeling that the bureaucracy has in fact increased and thus I'm not so sure throwing extra money helps. There's a saying that states that only when money runs out does the thinking start. So in practice as long as there is an abundance of resources nothing will really change as it doesn't really have to.

So based on this I would argue that the system shouldn't be rewarded with more resources before it can clearly demonstrate that it will not spend the resources on completely pointless work groups consisting of bureaucrats who just like to spend their time in glorified workshops in remote locations.

As for the tuition fees themselves, that's also somewhat of a difficult issue. On one hand I somewhat understand the logic of putting some pressure on students: if you want to study, you have to be confident enough in what your doing to put some money where your mouth is. But many students are already doing this as traditionally the state support for students hasn't been that great in Finland and students are often forced to take jobs on the side (as a curious side note, I argue that this habit of taking up extra work is especially good for engineering students who clearly benefit from the overlapping of school and work and are thus, in my opinion, better prepared to face future challenges when compared to being merely school educated and lacking all practical experience coming out of school).

From the point of view of an individual student the net effect isn't too different if you consider two options: 1) institute tuition fees or 2) reduce state support for students. The result is less money for the student, meaning more work or more loans. I am a proponent for the work-while-studying approach, but that's mainly in the cases where the work actually supports studies. In cases where the work is routine manual labor and doesn't really overlap with your studies, the benefits are not as many. And ultimately I'm not sure either approach is necessarily that good, despite the fact that provocatively enough I often do argue that students need to indeed be ready put up a bit more of a stake than merely saying that "Yeah, I'll graduate, maybe..."

So what should be done, then? I actually think that tuition fees shouldn't be instituted. I also don't think that student support from a financial standpoint should be increased either. I do, however, think that one thing where students could use support is with affordable housing. To an extent this mechanism is already in use as student housing is given to students for a certain period of time with the assumption that students will eventually graduate or then get kicked out of their apartments after some years. It's the cheap housing which then enables students to have slightly more cash with which to improve their lives, and more money can then be obtained via working or lending money from the bank.

But yeah, by no means is this a simple issue and the problems are very much real. However, I think that both the students and the government are coming at the problem in a way too hardliner way which to an extent frightens me. Schools don't deserve any more money as far as they're as fat as they currently are and tuition fees are a bad idea, but also giving students too much financial aid (as opposed to loans) is also somewhat questionable. The fact that students take quite long (~6-7 years, I would guess) to graduate may not necessarily be a bad thing, and the government should try to understand that point as well. As for the students whose studies drag on and on, I would argue that there's hardly any extra cost (after the already sunk costs) for the state as these people often don't attend lectures and classes and are merely trying to finish their thesis or do the last couple of exams and are thus hardly more than a few bits in a data system.

These were just my two cents on the subject from the top of my head, so again I reserve the right to change my view in the morning after I sleep a bit...

Strike!

2010-03-03T19:41:00.000+02:00

AKT, the Finnish transport workers' union, went on strike yesterday. Today the strike ended with both the employer and employee sides still unsatisfied. The strike itself brought Finland, to an extent, to a halt as all forms of automotive transport from public transport to cargo traffic came to a halt. Without going into the employee side's demands, this illustrates an interesting dynamic: in effect a single union can hold more or less an entire nation hostage. This situation seems completely absurd as in a sense the union seems to have a type of a monopoly on the human capital that its members essentially sell to companies.

Building off this analogy, it's interesting that this type of behavior is allowed from a legislative perspective. If we would have a company with a monopoly position behaving in a similar way, using it's monopoly to hold its customers hostage and forcing its own will on others in this respect, I'm quite certain that many regulatory entities would have a field day beating the company around with antitrust legislation.

Collars

2010-03-02T01:51:00.000+02:00

I recently gathered quite a strong opposition by arguing for contrast collars and cuffs. It seems that very many people don't like the look, which begs a question regarding why. As we know from history, the wealthier individuals have traditionally clustered towards white shirts, namely to demonstrate wealth by being able to keep the shirts white when the lesser people would soil them quickly. The story goes that white shirts eventually became boring and thus some individuals took to wearing also colored shirts, but opted for white collars and cuffs as these were the parts which would soil most frequently, thus still being able to differentiate from the pure blue collared group. Since then it seems that most people associate contrast collars with bankers and other suspicious types.

So thus it seems that ultimately there would be three potential reasons for why people might object to contrast collars: 1) because they are, to an extent, a sign of wealth, 2) because they are, to an extent, associated with questionable people who aren't too well liked these days, or 3) because of aesthetic reasons. The first point is easy to discard as it would imply that the same people would also need to object to white shirts, something which isn't as widely spread as a viewpoint as the hatred towards contrast collars. So then it must have something to do with the links to certain shady occupations or pure aesthetics.

We can't do much about the second point, but the third point warrants some more discussing. My girl friend is very open about her distaste towards these types of shirts and bases her argument on the fact that they just look horrible. There are some theories as to why contrast collars might appear horrible. Some say that if the tie is too pale it will get lost in the color of the shirt and thus allow the collar to stand out too much. This point is increasingly relevant as the contrast between the shirt and tie increases, namely by making the shirt out of stronger colors than the traditional light blue or light pink. Others suggest that the white collars draw the attention upwards and into the face of the person, and that this wouldn't be a good thing. I can't for the love of life recall the reasoning behind this argument, but I guess a tongue-in-cheek interpretation might include the face in question in the equation: if you have an ugly face, you won't want to draw attention to it... Discarding the second point we still find two things to bear in mind: make sure that your tie dominates the shirt, not the other way around, and that the contrast between the shirt and the collar doesn't become too drastic.

Moving on, to provoke people even more, I decided to go ahead and order yet another MTM shirt from France, this time with a nice 120s poplin with blue and white stripes combined with contrast collars and cuffs. And to ensure that there are enough stares, I also ordered a pair of braces from the UK to conclude the slimy banker look, which should be perfect for the upcoming premiere of Wall Street, the sequel.

Bow ties

2010-02-26T09:08:00.000+02:00

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..."

2010-02-22T00:02:00.001+02:00

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

On taxation

2010-02-20T11:49:00.000+02:00

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

2010-02-16T08:56:00.000+02:00

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:

I want to look at two industries (automobile and ICT).
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

2010-02-14T23:22:00.000+02:00

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:

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.
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.
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?

2010-02-13T12:15:00.001+02:00

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

2010-02-09T00:08:00.000+02:00

"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..."

2010-02-05T12:19:00.002+02:00

On public transport... Again...

2010-02-03T09:41:00.000+02:00

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...

Boating

2010-01-17T21:15:00.001+02:00

The boating season is soon upon us again...

Dissatisfaction

2009-12-15T01:37:00.000+02:00

As I have noted previously, I've been digging even deeper into the world of made-to-measure clothing. Today I fetched my newest suit from Sartoria Rossi. The suit is simple enough: a single-breasted, two-button, side-vented, notch-collared, four cuff-buttoned suit made out of extremely dark blue wool. So a fairly traditional "dark suit" to wear to more formal occasions and to replace tailcoats and tuxedos with (as I'm too lazy and cheap to actually invest in any formal or semi-formal attire).

Anyway, as I fetched the suit, I couldn't help but be slightly dissatisfied. I couldn't precisely point the finger at any specific thing at first, but after some time I came to the conclusion that some problems that I have with the suit are:

The shoulder padding could have been slightly (0.5-1cm) longer on either side.
The buttons could have been slightly higher (the lower button by 1-2 cm and the upper button by 2-3 cm). An offshoot of this is that now the lapels seem slightly too long and slightly too thin (in reality the lapels are nearly ok width-wise, but the length makes them seem narrower).
The jacket could have perhaps been slightly longer (1-2 cm).
The lining should have been silver instead of the slightly pinkish-grey.

Now, after spending the day thinking about all of this, it's actually fairly evident that most of the issues that I have with the suit are things that I could have and should have directly influenced. But all of these are again things which would have been really difficult for me to know in advance. So ultimately this is another case of needing to use the first purchase as a test to calibrate the system and thus enable successes in the future.

That said, at the end of the day I do have to admit that I'm starting to somewhat like the suit. The quality of the suit seems high enough for this price range and the service I got was very good. So as of now I don't really have anything against Sartoria Rossi, which seems to be one of the better stores in Helsinki when it comes to mens' clothing. One additional thing to note with made-to-measure suits is concerning the cut: you should pay special attention to suits that the manufacturer has made earlier, either MTM or off-the-rack. This will most likely be the cut that your suit will follow, so in this regard it's imperative to find the right manufacturer with the right cut that you like.

In the longer run I'll most likely test out one or two other manufacturers. Learning from this experience, I will most likely begin testing MTM manufacturers in the form of jackets at first. This has the benefit of reducing financial risk and trousers are anyway more or less simple and cheap to make, so calibration in that area may not be as crucial as with the jacket. The next thing I was thinking of extending my wardrobe with, at some point, is a double-breasted navy blazer. Pair that with grey flannel trousers, a blue and white striped shirt and a nice tie and the result will be a very classic and elegant outfit...

What is it that you want me to learn, exactly?

2009-12-02T01:48:00.000+02:00

The more I think and reflect against my studies so far, the more I start getting a feeling that I do not entirely grasp what it is that our education system in Finland is trying to achieve. Ever since the 90ies, the amount of starting positions in universities have increased, the ammattikorkeakoulu system has been established, and in general everything has gone to hell. Let me elaborate...

Looking at merely TKK, I can't help but think that it is ridiculously easy to get into TKK. Just write your name on a piece of paper and that's about it. I've been led to understand that in the history this hasn't been so. But regardless, these days it seems that just about anybody can get into the school, and this often also happens. This naturally decreases the quality of the student material, which is very much visible in day-to-day schoolwork.

Take an example of a recent essay we were tasked to write for school in a small group. The essay wasn't that long, but would have required a bit of understanding on the topic and preferrably some type of analysis and a synthesis of a situation based on the former. The amount of literature (articles, studies, books, etc.) is vast and finding material is trivial. What happens? The typical student appears to approach the problem at a shallow and superficial level: instead of doing an analysis over a period of time we get a snapshot of the current moment, instead of objective and quantifiable material we get the view from corporate websites, instead of any type of structured framework, we get a list of bullet points. And then my favorite: Wikipedia references. And all of this in a course which is aimed at Masters students, who should be now be fairly familiar with how to proceed with academic work and write academic papers. Sufficient to say, the situation is not looking too bright for our essay.

Maybe this is underestimating the intelligence of your average student, but the other alternative isn't that appealing either: are our students just intellectually lazy and uninterested in putting in the effort to understand the exercises? Maybe this is the point: when you try to educate everyone at a high level, you are bound to get unmotivated people to join the crowd, just for the sake of getting a paper and in this way dilute the value of the degree. And ultimately, what is the point of educating everyone at a very high level despite the fact that a fair portion of these people will then continue on to perform mechanical tasks that do not require the ability to utilize the skills that the universities are supposed to teach.

Mind you, I'm being slightly provocative here and venting my frustration at the system, since I do feel that the things we are taught are to an extent valuable and good, but I am annoyed to see this intellectual lazyness and mediocricity in a portion of the students. That said, I fortunately do know some people from school who I actually do know and trust to do a good job, so maybe all is not lost. But in practice I would still advocate restricting the number of entrants to universities, attempting to shift the ratio of faculty to students into a more favorable direction, and overall demanding more from the students (e.g. if you return a bad paper, the course staff should be keener to just flunk people as opposed to letting them barely pass).

Status update

2009-11-28T02:17:00.000+02:00

Every once in a while it's a good idea to just stop and breathe. For me, that happened this evening for no apparent reason. I've been deep-diving into very many different things recently and been trying to kick my studies into a bigger gear again in an attempt to get all my courses done by next summer. This has meant attending a couple of obligatory lectures every week, which have infact demonstrated yet again to me that I'm studying the right things: we've had good guest lecturers who I've at some times disagreed with and openly questioned them, which only goes to show that I do infact care enough about what I'm studying to actually take part in the discussion. That's more than what many students can say, at least when I reflect my experiences from campus.

Work-wise things are going quite well and my bosses are making sure that I have enough on my plate. In a sense I've come to the conclusion that my bosses are very good and they do actually care about the employees and help us grow in the direction that we are interested in. I know it sounds like a cliche, but recent discussions and actions have confirmed this to be true to the extent that sometimes the pace frightens me. But in so many ways things could be a lot worse, so in this respect I have very much to be grateful for.

As for my personal life, I won't dig too deep into that. But I will say that over the past half a year I've run into my ex on a couple of occasions, and ultimately I'm very relieved that that is over. In fact every time just helps me realize even more how much happier and better off I am with R than compared to my previous relationships. It's scary to think how far down the sinking ship would've dragged me had I not been able to detach myself from it. But fortunately I was able to detach myself, as the improvements in my quality of life have been so drastic that it's not easy to think of words to describe the change.

But to summarize, it's horrifying to think how well things are going on so many different fronts. A cynical person like me can't help but think that this sort of situation can't be sustainable and that something bad must be lurking around the corner as the current situation is way too good to be true, if you actually stop to think about it. But hopefully it will continue to be true for a long time still...

In search of the perfect shirt

2009-11-12T17:18:00.000+02:00

In this day and age the requirements that the workplace dress code enforces upon employees has been very much relaxed, even to the point where a white-collar worker may show up to the office in jeans and a polo shirt. This has in essence seen the disappearance of ties and suits from very many fields which previously required these. However, from my personal experience the basic shirt for men has not disappeared; far from it. The requirements for the basic dress shirt have been tightening: if you rid yourself of suits and jackets, your shirt better be ironed and fit you well, as there isn't an extra layer protecting you any longer.

Interestingly enough most shirts that people wear at the office are ill fitting. Some of the common issues that we are faced with are shirts that are too large (and thus resemble a tent in fit) or may be lacking in the sleeve length department. When someone actually wears a tie, the collar is either way too large or then it will basically strangle the person who wears the shirt. And so on.

For the past couple of years I've been going through a pile of shirts from different manufacturers, prices ranging from two dozen euros up to 150 euros. The feeling I've gotten from these shirts is that with the extra premium you often get a better quality fabric and in some cases the stitching quality is improved. But ultimately if you don't get the fit right, you're not even halfway to the finishing line. I personally have a somewhat problematic torso: I'm fairly slim in the region of the waist with a slightly broader upper torso which then has two longer than avarage arms attached to it. So finding an off-the-rack shirt that fits me has been a path fraught with headaches. But it has been a learning process and it has developed my taste to a point where I can say precisely what I like or don't like about a shirt.

The culmination, at least for now, has been the arrival of my first made-to-measure shirt, which was a surprisingly pleasant experience as I was already mentally prepared to throw the first trial away as I anticipated that it would be near impossible to get the measurements exactly right the first time round. And in a way I was right: I still need to do a bit of fine-tuning with the sizing, but the end result of the first attempt is not in fact that bad: it's already easily become my favorite shirt, not least because it's the first black shirt that I've owned in quite a while. But the next shirt will be better...

On the temporary nature of structures

2009-11-02T13:32:00.000+02:00

I've frequently argued with many people about things which ultimately end up in a discussion about nationalism. One aspect is legislation: if I'm a member of a group of people occupying a piece of land and wish to remain a member of the group, I will naturally have to adhere to some types of rules. If I don't adhere to them, there are typically some types of consequences. In nature this consequence is often expulsion from the community. And in our world can typically range from reprimands and fines to imprisonment or even death (which I don't necessarily agree with).

So what can one do if one doesn't agree with the rules? The most obvious choice is always to accept that it's a trade-off situation: I will have to accept them to get the other benefits of staying with the group. So in short: do nothing. The second choice is to do something about it, i.e. attempt to reform legislation, change taxation, or do something else. So essentially bitch and moan and propose alternative solutions and apply all the rhetorical tools that you have available to you. Or thirdly you can agree that you have differing views with the rest of the group and accept that you do not wish to be a part of the group any longer and find a new group to join. There may be other options as well, but these are the blindingly obvious ones.

It is the third option which typically tends to cause the most friction with the people who I've discussed. I think the issue is that very many people can or do not want to question the concept of a nation. The problem arises when someone suggests that maybe the concept of a sovereign nation is something that should be challenged: the world should be a lot more fluid and enable us to disband with the concept altogether. Maybe that is a bit radical, but on a more tangible level I think that I personally should be able to change my citizenship if I do not agree with what the rest of the group that forms a nation is doing. Ultimately, however, I think that a nation is merely a temporary structure that is useful as long as it serves a purpose. It is a mean to an end, but not a purpose in itself. Similar to any sort of alliance between entities, but still ultimately temporary in nature, even though nations are a lot more long in duration than other structures.