First impressions

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...

On human capital

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

On taxation

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

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

Research questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking ground

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

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

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

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

What's for dinner?

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

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

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

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

Layer cake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On public transport... Again...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boating

The boating season is soon upon us again...

Dissatisfaction

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:

1. The shoulder padding could have been slightly (0.5-1cm) longer on either side.
2. 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).
   
3. The jacket could have perhaps been slightly longer (1-2 cm).
4. 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?

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

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

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

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.

The decline of journalism

Maybe the topic is slightly provocative, but it seems that at least some Finnish newspapers have been declining in quality very rapidly. I personally don't subscribe to any newspapers as they don't fit my lifestyle: I don't eat breakfast nor do I sit at home in the mornings for long enough to be able to read a newspaper. Instead I prefer to get my news online. So that's why I pay more attention to the online versions of some of Finland's larger newspapers. But unfortunately it seems that either some of these papers don't take online presence seriously or then they just don't care for their brands.

I vaguely recall that Kauppalehti used to be a semi-decent newspaper which focused on business. We still get the paper version at the office and because of some unknown campaign, my new broker is going to send two months worth of Kauppalehti to me. But to be honest, I'm not entirely sure about the brand anymore. I check out their online news about once a day, and the quality is appalling, to say the least. These days it seems that it's a rare case and a big feat when they manage to post a bit of news online without it containing a number of spelling mistakes. And even that would be ok if they would actively hunt them down and correct them. But more annoyingly I think that their overall quality is very much lacking: their news seems to be very biased and tabloid-like. They seem to be desperately seeking for sensational stories, and failing at this, as well as passing rumors and gossip. If one were to have tendencies to see conspiracies, one could easily assume that the writers of Kauppalehti were actively using their medium to drive the stocks of various companies up or down, depending on their will. But that may be giving too much credit to Kauppalehti, so maybe we'll just assume that it's just bad journalism by amateur reporters.

Another thing that I've been able to amuse myself with are the commenting features of some online newspapers, for instance Helsingin Sanomat. I've read very many different online news sites in the past decade, and seldom have I seen such an amount of trolling as is frequently present in the comments of Finland's number one newspaper. I'm not saying that it's the fault of Helsingin Sanomat; far from it. From what I've read their news, I think that they're actually doing a decent job of it. I may not be directly in line with their political stance, but I can appreciate what they're writing and where they're coming from. But the comments! If you ever have to kill an hour or two of time, head on down to the comments area of HS's web site and you're bound to get a laugh or two, or your money back.

First level reached

Earlier today (Sunday) I had my first level-test in Krav Maga. Or any martial art/self-defense system, for that matter. The experience was certainly interesting as I had practically no clue as to what I was walking into on a practical level. All in all the test was certainly much easier than I expected and I think I would've given myself some negative feedback on a few things, the most annoying of which was when I totally froze and failed to defend myself properly when the instructor was hitting hooks at my head. The situation was slightly amusing since I don't really know why that happened: I knew what I was facing and what I had to do, I saw the fist, but for some odd reason I failed to react. On the second try I got my arm in the way, but blocked with the wrong part and got another hit on my head. It was only on the third attempt that I was actually able to focus enough to get any type of semi-credible defense and counter-attack in place. In retrospect that was the most annoying thing that happened and I would've given myself a minus for something as stupid as that.

Anyway, ultimately it seemed like the P1 test was more focused on just checking that everyone was somewhat sane and able to take part in further training, if they so wished. This became obvious when everyone passed the test and there were a few people who had no clue as to how to break free from a headlock as well as other types of chokes. In general, though, it seemed quite strange that people who had attended the course would have been able to not pick up the simple moves and techniques, but oh well...

Now with the P1 behind, I guess life will go on as usual and I'll see if I can train enough to get P2 next spring. I was also thinking of supplementing my KM with some fitness boxing as the company seems to be kind enough to arrange a fitness boxing lesson every Monday at a nearby office...

On taxes and subsidies

Finland has been recently trying to revamp its laws and taxation when it comes to saving for pensions. Previously the setup has been that individuals gain tax benefits if they save towards their pensions via voluntary pension insurances, which are managed by private companies. These companies typically charge an arm and a leg for offering this service, which seems logical for them and raises the question of how silly this is for the government to essentially subsidize private companies in this way. And taking into account the fact that most likely these funds will anyway be very conservatively managed and create less-than-optimal profits for their owners (and the overpriced management fees on top), the system seems flawed.

Anyway, the changes in the legislation seem to focus on introducing a setup where the individual person can use a multitude of different financial instruments when saving, and is able to perform reallocation of capital with no tax consequences, as long as they do not withdraw the capital from these special accounts before they reach the pension age. Sounds a lot more reasonable than what we've previously had. However, I think this still doesn't address the rather fundamental problem of market distortions that are caused every time the government steps in.

I'm personally very skeptical about any types of subsidies or benefits that the government (or any other authority) hands out. They may benefit some, but most likely the overall consequences aren't understood due to the complex nature of the world that we live in. A very good example of this is in the Finnish tax legislation where you can deduct parts of the interest payments that you incur from your house loan. While I technically understand the intention behind that, I fear that in fact these types of subsidies merely end up directly into the house prices and push them further up, meaning that the net benefit for an individual who is looking to purchase a house is more or less zero, at best.

Additionally, the problem on sudsidization via taxes is that it is so bloody complex. Combine, for instance, the two above topics: saving via investing and purchasing a home. You get tax benefits from your home loan, but if you get any types of capital incomes from abroad, you start losing your tax benefit. This doesn't happen with capital income from Finland. Ok, I can see that this might encourage Finns to invest in Finland. Fair enough. But now my investment portfolio has an increasing amount of risk that stems from the fact that I do not distribute my savings geographically. So if things go south in Finland and the economy goes bad, I lose my job (and thus my steady income from wages), and then I also lose my equity that I've been trying to build up for the rainy day, because I haven't been able to achieve a properly diverse portfolio of ownings from abroad. A double-whammy right in the back of my head. (And yes, I am aware that I could invest abroad via mutual funds that are managed by Finnish financial institutions, but the amounts they charge for this service are ludicrous to say the least).

So ultimately I think the goal should be to get away from tax benefits and subsidies, which unnecessarily complicate the system and don't even achieve the intended results at the end of the day. Instead we should scrap these types of systems in favor of a lower tax rate. And as an additional benefit, we could also decrease the size of the tax authority, which would no longer need such a large machinery to operate...

On electric cars

The previous entry consisted of only a short advertisement video of the Fisker Karma, quite arguably one of the coolest electric cars yet. I've talked with a number of people about cars and I personally still maintain that a car is an aspirational thing, at least for me. If I ever get myself a car, it has to be a car that I want. Not a compromise. It has to be something that I actually want to get into and absolutely want to take a ride in it. Not something that makes a small piece of me die every time I see it.

If nothing else, things in life should be beautiful. And the Karma is certainly more beautiful than a Prius. And on every front the Karma just absolutely destroys the Prius; design, performance, treehugging, etc. Hell, the car was designed by the same bloke who did Aston Martin's DB9 and V8 Vantage, and those are absolutely stunning cars. So, the Karma will obviously be something that should serve as a good launch for the electric cars: it shows that an electric car doesn't need to be an underpowered wimp that looks like crap. And that's important, since as long as the electric car is merely something that you buy so that you can save the environment, it won't fly. But as soon as you make the electric car into something that is elegant, fast, and which makes you drool every time you see it, then you've solved the problem.

And finally: a Toyota isn't cool. Period.

Stunning

Specialization

I've been a customer of Nordea, a financial services group, for quite a while. On a general level they've performed decently well in their services and the prices that I've had to pay have been very reasonable. They haven't succumbed to any of the pitfalls that another group, Sampo, has been treading through over the past few years. Recently, however, I have been getting somewhat fed up with Nordea, namely the prices they charge for making investments abroad.

The mantra that the larger groups have been saying for years and years is that it pays to focus all of your dealings, from day-to-day finances to investments to loans as well as insurances, to a single entity. The logic goes that the group is able to give you significant and tangible discounts on different products, thus benefitting the end customer as well. I've never entirely bought this argument, namely because I've been somewhat skeptical in regards to putting all my eggs in one basket. This turned out to be a good call when Kaupthing all of a sudden fell down and Sampo's debit cards stopped working. I still had Nordea which more or less worked. Kudos to them for that.

However, when it comes to investments, I've recently started moving towards Nordnet, which is a specialized internet-based broker which operates in the Nordic region. The benefits for me are very tangible, and individual transaction costs from buying e.g. German stocks are a very nifty 70% lower than with Nordea. There are other benefits as well in the form of a better user interface, increased amounts of data for me to access, etc. So overall the package is better, and more importantly cheaper for me.

Now this provokes an interesting question: why can't a group like Nordea, which works with revenue of over eight billion euros per year, offer me competitive pricing in this category? Or more importantly, I know that they could offer it to me, but I would have to go through various negotiations and even then it's not that likely that it would happen. And even then their web-based interface is lacking behind Nordnet's. So this makes it very tempting to jump to the conclusion that specialization is the key here: a company of 323 employees and a specialized business model just runs circles around a mammoth of a company with 34000 employees. In this case I am guessing that the key is the increased focus and a very compelling offering in regards to increased value for the customer. The formula is simple, and thus it's easy for me to motivate the move. Let's see what happens...

Stockholm Halvmarathon '09

The one obligatory half-marathon for 2009 is now behind and the feelings are quite mixed. On one hand the entire trip to Stockholm was great and the run was good. But on the other hand I missed my target time by 21 seconds. It may seem like nothing when we're talking about a 21 kilometer run, but it's annoyingly close. Had the difference been many minutes, that would've been easier. Now I can't help but start thinking that had I in fact been just a bit faster at the drinking stops I would've been able to go under two hours. But oh well, such is life. And here's some statistics about the run (from the HR monitor, so the time is slightly different):

• Duration: 2 hours, 0 minutes, 28 seconds
• HR (average): 179
• HR (peak): 187
• Energy: 2553 kcal

And then the times that the organizers recorded for me:

Distance	Total time	Lap time	Pace
5km	0.27.17	27.17	5.27/km
10km	0.54.52	27.34	5.30/km
15km	1.23.42	28.50	5.46/km
20km	1.53.56	30.13	6.02/km
Finish	2.00.21	6.24	5.50/km

Overall it's somewhat difficult for me to analyze what the issues were. I guess one thing that can be derived from the numbers is that I started faster again and then slowed down towards the end instead of being able to run with an increasing speed. But then again, there was only one point in the run when I actually felt really tired and that was around the 18km mark (the 17-18km part took me 6:18.7, according to my own measurements). Besides that, the run was quite decent, but I couldn't have gone any faster. So in this respect I'm somewhat satisfied with my run. Next time the target time is 1.55.00...

Decision making and the recession

The recession seems to have finally hit pretty close to home. While coming back from Sunday's training I swung by the store to pick up some food and for the first time during my time in Lauttasaari I was met with a slightly sad situation. In front of me in the queue was a woman who was purchasing a couple of ciders and a salad. It turned out that her bank balance wasn't too good as her debit card got rejected twice. After the first rejection she removed one cider from her purchases. After the second rejection she returned the cider back and just removed the salad. Apparently getting alcohol is more important than eating.

Krav Maga

I recently took up a new hobby to support my quest in improving my physique: Krav Maga. The choice may seem somewhat strange when it is reflected against my previous hobbies of choice: yoga, golf, fencing, tennis, long-distance running, etc. It's actually quite exhilarating to try something entirely new again; the rest of the people practicing Krav Maga don't fit into the typical group of people who I've met in conjunction with my other hobbies.

So, why Krav Maga? Well, I've always been drawn to a certain level of pragmatism: I want things to work and be as efficient as possible. One of the key issues that I had with fencing was that it just felt a little bit silly, like I was restricted by something artificial. Why should I have to respect the right of way if the point is to kill the other combatant? Why can I only hit the torso? This elaborates why I was very quick to move on from foil and try épée instead. Nonetheless, regardless of how much I want to live in the times that have already passed, I have to admit that cross-training with other methods is a necessity that can't be circumvented. Thus Krav Maga: a seemingly very simple and efficient method of self defense, which focuses not on form but on the ultimate endgame -- survival.

This actually illustrates a very relevant point: in the search for efficiency, simplicity rules. But simplicity isn't a silver bullet. Nor is it as restrictive as it may sound. In golf one of the most common problems that many people have is that their back swing isn't efficient: it's hindranced by all types of extra maneuvers, which don't belong in the swing and just increase complexity and chances for things to go wrong. The same is true for punches: even the most basic of punches, the straight punch, isn't as intuitive as people think. It is simple, but you have to get your head around to the fact that you don't swing your arm. Instead you punch directly at the target and then retract your arm into a protective position again. Simple. Elegant. Efficient. It serves a purpose and does so efficiently...

Adaptability

The economy has been in a state of depression and recession for a few years now, and unemployment rates are going up in Finland. This has sparked a lot of discussion and disgruntled people have voiced their feelings about quite many different things. People still seem to be surprised by the fact that in the private sector public companies will act in a radical fashion and attempt to adapt to changing situations by laying off parts of the workforce. It's called adaptability; if the landscape is changing, you either adapt or you die. It's unfortunate, but that's how the game works. Unfortunately, however, it seems that in some cases companies maybe should exercise a bit of moderation as the actions have sometimes been rash at best and purely idiotic at worst.

Nonetheless, the companies will attempt to function in the best interest of their owners, or so the theory goes. But these times are well to demonstrate, yet again, that individual people must also be able to adapt to changing situations. I somehow get a feeling that too many people are stuck inside a box and when things abruptly change, they are unable to transform themselves. What this past decade or two have shown is that the world is becoming increasingly dynamic, as opposed to the more traditional stable landscape in which you sought work positions from which you would retire from. So it is up to the employee to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability by being able to jump from one career to the next, even across different disciplines and industries. But ultimately I feel that the key point is to have the skills to actively renew and retrain oneself to be able to go up against new challenges.

On a slightly different note, I have also gotten a feeling by following some discussions surrounding the Finnish welfare system that the system is in fact slightly flawed and does not really encourage entrepreneurship and active job seeking as much as it could. A friend of mine recently listed himself as unemployed, and being a non-native he was interested in using this pause in his career to learn more Finnish in order to increase his attractiveness in the job market. Unfortunately, however, it seems that there are some situations in which he will lose his unemployment benefits if he begins to take language courses. Apparently the system would, at worst, classify him as a student and then strip him of his benefits. This is not only silly, but also very counterproductive. Overall it seems that the system will very often make its victims very passive. I have some thoughts on how the system could be reformed (and overall I feel that reforms will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary, as the system is very much broken), but I fear that I will have to leave them for another blog post. But feel free to pull my sleeve if you want to talk about these issues, for they are very interesting.

Well...

On dialogs and debates

When I was in high school, we had a number of debates during Finnish classes, where students were introduced into the fine arts of rhetoric and the things that accompany it. The concept was very good: teach the students how to argue and debate as well as utilize words and wit. Somehow I feel that a lot of the really basic problems of society could be avoided if instead of resorting to violence people would possess the ability to talk, discuss, and communicate. But far too often when a person runs out of words, they resort to other, more unfortunate measures in trying to communicate their point across.

Another learning from these debates was that quite often people do not or cannot form opinions, or are unwilling to argue a side. The best debates, in my opinion, were the ones where you found two people with opposing views of a common topic which both held dear. It was truly interesting to observe the jousting that ensued. But unfortunately very often the situation was very asymmetric (i.e. one was very opinionated and the other could not care less) or then the overall mood was indifferent. This is one reason why I am somewhat hesitant when it comes to the praising of democracy's flawlessness...

I have unfortunately long since forgotten whether we were taught any theory behind dialogs and debates, but on a personal and purely empirical level I think that some very obvious clusters can be formed. A dialog can be exploratory in nature, where the participants collectively work towards discovering ideas through an exchange of information and opinions. Or then a dialog can be more competitive and debating in nature, where the exploratory objective is surpassed by the objective of winning by means of either convincing the opponent of your point of view or by merely deflating the opponents arguments.

Politicians seem to venture on a very different level and are measured against different dimensions. In a debate it is not only relevant for the politician to win the debate, but also to do so while applying good form and by not upsetting the people too much. The battle of debate is subordinate to the larger war which is fought on a higher level. And one must not upset the general populace, which wields the power. It is this group which I am slightly afraid of, as it requires much more studying of a person of political inclination to understand their ultimate motive, as they often play very many games at once.

This does tie back to the dynamics of high school debates: I argue that, at least our, debate was much more political in nature than what, I would imagine, the teachers wished to teach. Ultimately it does not matter whether or not you had the more solid arguments or the ability to deflate the arguments of your opponent. Ultimately the decision of who won was decided by the rest of the class, which very often resulted in a situation where the debate turned into a popularity vote of either the debaters or then of the topics. Very seldom did the actual debating amount to anything: the judging parties had already made up the mind, even prior to the debate.

Housekeeping

It's amazing how much stuff a person is able to amass, even within a short amount of time. I'm constantly faced with the task of trying to keep my apartment in check, and questioning whether I need to keep something or not. The struggle seems to be something of a never ending streak of losses: you just can't win! I've been playing around with an idea of revising my apartment a bit in a desperate effort to clear some more room for coats and jackets and streamline everything by putting books behind some type of glass doors to keep the dust out. But in a small apartment it seems to be incredibly difficult to find the type of furniture that you actually want and that would fit the needs that you've specified.

On other frontiers I guess a bit of housekeeping is also required. In the digital world it seems that you also have to be fairly rigorous to ensure that you throw out the old as you introduce the new. I took some first steps by removing obviously dead and/or outdated links from my blog (it seems that quite many people lack the persistence to keep up a blog, so I got rid of all links to blogs that haven't been updated in a while).

An additional challenge has also appeared with the emergence of social networking sites: how do you prune your network? It isn't as trivial as throwing away an old shirt, since removing links may be a politically sensitive issue. "It's nothing personal, but I don't want you in my social network anymore" just seems sort of blunt and only works for the persona non grata -types, who you don't necessarily want to deal with in the future. But otherwise I guess it's just a matter of more carefully grouping and segmenting the network. Or something to that extent.

Patience, perseverence, and persistence

For some odd reason patience seems to be one of the rarer virtues around. This manifested itself in e.g. the overt greed of Wall Street and the City, and how sustainability and persistence were forgotten. It's especially sad to see, amongst others, longstanding and very traditional institutions be the victims of very short-term greed.

On a slightly separate note, I recently signed up for the Stockholm Half Marathon. It is held on Saturday, September 12th and I thought that it would be a great way to rectify the injustice of me not getting to participate in HCR'09 this earlier in the spring due to health issues. Also, I recently noticed that due to some slipping in lifestyle-related things I had started to amass some weight. Instead of going on a diet as such, I just decided that I would kick up my training a notch and then adjust my eating habits to contain a larger proportion of vegetables, fruits, and the like. Another policy decision concerned fast food and soft drinks: they're gone and replaced with more frequent home cooking and mineral water.

Related to this, I never really understood the point of any type of strict, project-oriented dieting, which seems to be all the craze with women. It's not only one or two women who I know who seem to be doing this; deciding to drop weight over a certain period of time and then they go back to their old routines. But if the old routines were the ones that brought the extra weight in the first place, how does this work? I think that it's the longer term policy decisions with which you hopefully more permanently alter you lifestyle that get the job done.

I also broke out my heart rate monitor from the closet again to complement my running. It seems that I may have finally matured enough to actually be able to do slower runs at lower heart rate levels, which are quite possibly the things that were missing from my previous training. It again requires a healthy bit of patience and restraint to keep yourself from just blasting away on your jogs in the same way that you've been used to before. But again, hopefully this type of strategy will pay off in Stockholm and if things go well, then maybe even on a marathon next summer. All in all I feel that this recent change of trying to integrate sports and exercising as a more integral part of my life may be for the best. We'll see...

On generosity

In brief, my position on generosity is increasingly that you should not be generous. It isn't as simple as that, I'm afraid, but if nothing else, there's no point in it. If you are generous, people will forget it very quickly. If you are not generous, then you're pretty much like everyone else and/or you just merely upset some people. Machiavelli had an interesting chapter on whether or not princes should be generous, and he concluded something similar. He did, however, also note that if you are generous, you should be generous out of someone else's fortune, as that does not deplete your fortune or the fortunes of your citizens.

That said, you actually should be generous, but not to everyone. I have increasingly gotten the feeling that there are two criteria to judge when deciding on whether or not to be generous to someone: 1) are they in a position to offer you something and 2) if they are, are they willing to give you something? Why be generous to a person who does not reciprocate at all, either because they cannot afford to or because they just do not want to?

Customer retention

I've recently had to buy quite a few pairs of trousers in an attempt to revitalize my wardrobe in that area. For some strange reason it's a lot easier to casually pick up jackets, coats, and shirts rather than trousers and jeans. I've even bought shoes online in a vim. But trousers need consideration. Anyway, without getting into the whole debacle, I would like to highlight an issue related to marketing and customer retention...

As everyone who has passed Marketing 101 knows, traditional view holds that it's a lot cheaper (and more profitable) in the long run to retain customers rather than continuously attract new ones. That's why most companies in most businesses would do better to shed the transactional mode of business and focus on building relationships. Relationships are based on trust. And trust in business is created via successful deals. Now, in consumer business, at least, it's very easy to create long-term customer relationships by rectifying mistakes that you've made and compensating the customer very generously. If the customer's bad experience can be salvaged into a good one, you'll also be able to tap the viral marketing mechanism: the customer will undoubtedly tell his friends about the good service he got.

So, back to trousers. I bought a new pair of... uhmm... Swedish designer jeans from Beamhill and a pair of Pal Zileri trousers from Fere. Both had problems. The cloth of the jeans wore down and got a hole after two weeks of use and the trousers, after being initially adjusted, started to unravel from the back seem. Now, at this point the two different companies went two very different routes. That's why I will continue to be a customer of one company, but stear clear of the other.

First, the Pal Zileris... I took them back to the store and I was met by a shocked salesperson, who seemed genuinely apologetic after I told him about the somewhat awkward situation. Then we laughed and agreed that it's a good thing that men wear jackets to cover their rear. The salesperson then proceeded to ensure me that although the tailor had gone home for the day (to be fair, I was at the store at around 5.30 PM, and they were closing pretty soon), they would fix the trousers first thing in the morning and I would be able to pick them up pretty much as soon as the store opened. All of this on top of the fact that they kindly enough gave me a discount and threw in free alterations to the trousers in the first place, and even then they delivered within 24 hours since I was in somewhat of a hurry that week. Brilliant service.

Then on to the jeans. Amazingly enough the cloth itself wore out with the jeans. And in two weeks! That can't be possible! I take them back to the store and the salesperson takes them and my contact information and promises to be in touch the following morning as she is unable to make a decision on how to proceed by herself and has to consult her boss. Ok, fair enough... Then, the following day... No call. I get interested about the situation as those were the only pair of jeans that I had at the moment and swing by the store just before closing time. The same salesperson is there, this time telling me that yes, I'll get a new pair and that I can pick them up the following day (Day 3). Not any mention of apologies for not following up on the promised call, which then resulted in me making a pointless trip to the store. Well, come Day 3 I go to the store just before closing time and this time there is another salesperson, who I explain the situation to, and just as I'm finished the first salesperson comes along and it turns out that this new person is in fact the boss of the initial salesperson. And now it turns out that the jeans are still not at the store, but I can go fetch them from some obscure location elsewhere. Or I can wait and have them possibly fetch the jeans to this store tomorrow.

At this point I'm quite annoyed at the fact that I've made two pointless trips and still don't have my jeans. My annoyance might've become obvious after I told them that let's just schedule my pickup for next week, so that they would have seven whole days to be able to handle the simple transportation to the store. They insist that the jeans will be available the following day (Day 4). Ok, I'm somewhat skeptical, thank, and leave. Then after 30 minutes I get a phone call from the store saying that the jeans are there. Excellent! I didn't typo the phone number that I gave them. Up until now I was fairly convinced that there was a possibility that I wrote the wrong phone number. Anyway, what am I supposed to do about the situation now? The information is useless as I've already gone home and don't feel like making a fourth trip to the store.

Ultimately I ended up getting the new jeans, and I've been wearing them now for slightly over a week. Right now I'm fairly jumpy and I have this strange feeling that the jeans are slowly coming apart again. Let's hope that they won't, since I do not want to deal with this company again. Actually, if the jeans do come apart, I'm just going to take them back and leave them there. I don't really even care about the money as it was just slightly more than a day's pay, but let's just say that if they don't offer any tangible apology, I'm going to be slightly sad for them.

Let's just hope that the jeans will now last. And I'll never buy anything Swedish ever again, just to be safe...

Asymmetricity of information

The internet is truly a game changing disruption. I've noticed this again recently as I've shifted even more of my shopping online. It's actually quite logical: if you're buying more or less standardized products, the main differentiator between sellers is price. Right now I'm looking for sunglasses. I've narrowed my search down to one pair that I'm fairly interested in, and there is only one place in Finland selling that specific brand of sunglasses. I haven't been there yet, but I'm imagining that they are most likely charging a premium. Fortunately, however, I've been doing my homework and calculated the price that I would have to pay if I ordered them from abroad (including shipping and handling, taxes, and customs fees). Another dimension to this is the currency market, which gives me an additional discount to offset the fees with. So now, thanks to the available information related to the product's price as well as an efficient method of transporting goods globally, I'm going to be in a lot better position to negotiate with the local merchant about the price of the pair of sunglasses that he is selling.

The interesting thing about this is, however, that it's precisely in the asymmetric distribution of information where the merchants make their profits from. Used car merchants used to be in the brilliant position to basically lie and cheat the customer, since the customer was seldom able to value the car as well as the merchant could. Now with the rise of the internet and an access to global used car markets, the buyer can calculate some different scenarios about what it would cost to obtain the car from some other dealer. So in a sense the customer is now able to value the car being sold in a lot more precise and better way. This has sent the used car dealers scrambling for the hills. One Finnish dealer was actually saying in a newspaper that the internet should be destroyed, because it's killing business. That may be, but I for one see the positive aspects in this: business shouldn't necessarily be based on lying and cheating the customer but on creating tangible value add for the customer. If you're not creating value, the globalization of markets will soon drive you out of business. And that's how it should be...

Ethical financing

I was recently in Turku during a student-oriented binge drinking spree. The idea was that people would go around the bar boats in the river Aura and have a drink in each one and collect stamps to obtain a small cloth patch that they can then stitch onto their student overalls. My freshman year came and went a long time ago, but some friends of mine were still able to abduct me from the office and drag me to Turku, so there I was...

After a couple of hours of crawling through bars, we ended up meeting some casual acquaintances from Helsinki. Amongst the group that we met was a person studying economics and finance at Helsinki. I found her quite interesting as she obviously disliked my blatant way of firing opinions and my perception of the world. She insisted that she would become an ethical financier once she graduated. This sparked my interest as the issue is very topical, but I don't think that the finance world will ever change. In my view people will remain greedy and the people on Wall Street will continue to see the world as a zero-sum game. Somebody wins and somebody loses. I don't think there's inherently anything wrong with that: as an analogy we could look at boxing. I don't think the boxers in the ring have any sort of ethical problems when they go head on and try to knock the other guy out. It's only if they come out of the ring and start punching bypassers that it turns somewhat questionable; everyone knows that it's not too nice to punch random bypassers on the street.

Similarily I think financiers and the lot will act extremely rationally in the future and attempt to optimize against their own gain. And that there isn't inherently anything wrong with this: more money is better. Saying that you are an ethical financier is sort of like going in the boxing ring and saying that you'll only use your left hand: you're doing a stupid move and giving the other guy a very big advantage over you. What's the point? I personally won't be giving any of my money to a person who is going to most likely make a loss with it because of some personal agenda and ethical beliefs that they advocate. Instead I want the person investing my money to maximize my money against the timeframe that I'm working.

Now, the observant reader will notice that we completely omitted the definition for "ethical" investing/financing in this context. That's something that my ethical financier and I didn't get around to talking, perhaps because of the many beers that I'd already had. But regardless, I don't think that's the real issue at hand. I would say that within the boxing ring and within the markets, the only unethical things are the things that are made illegal by law. It's not nice to manipulate the markets and use inside information, and so on. But the thing here is that in my opinion the ethical issues should be tackled by the regulator. They should act as the referee and determine what should be allowed and what shouldn't be allowed. One thing that should have become clear from this financial meltdown is that the free markets very rarely are able to moderate themselves over a longer period of time. They always get greedy and the game gets tougher. That's when the regulator should step in and the referee should separate the boxers and make sure that the situation doesn't get out of hand.

The argument I'm trying to provoke here is that if your job is winning, you should not hesitate to use the angles and destroy the opponent. If you look at star athletes, I don't think they go into competition thinking about whether or not it's ethical to beat the opponent. They work within the boundaries that are set by the rules and they do their utmost to win. It's very difficult to start making rules if you're the one who is competing: you can't remain objective enough. And you shouldn't bother yourself with stuff like that. It should be the regulator who needs to understand what the rules are and how they should be developed.

Interestingly enough I don't personally, for instance, engage in derivatives trading. Not because of any ethical reasons as such, but because I feel that I don't right now need derivatives to protect my portfolio and on the other hand I don't want to engage in speculative behavior with derivatives as the risks are too high for me. But derivatives are good for some things and less good for other things. The million dollar question, I guess, is how the regulators will tackle the question about speculative behavior with derivatives: is it ok or should it be regulated? And other such questions...

The new BMW Z4

... it is also a paint brush, so how convenient is that? Aspirational over rational arguments every day of the week, when it comes to cars. You should never get a car that you're merely satisfied with; you should get a car that you actually want. And right now I want quite a few different cars... You know, for different occasions...

On thoughtlessness

We went to see Angels & Demons last week with R and for some odd reason I always get very annoyed at the movie theater. Granted, the movie itself wasn't as horrible as I was afraid of, but it seems that the typical moviegoer these days is not capable of being in any way considerate when it comes to the experience of other viewers. One of my pet peeves is how people are checking their phone in a dark movie theater. Just maybe it's not a good idea, namely because when the backlight of the phone's screen kicks on in a dark room, your movie viewing experience is degraded as your view is automatically turned to the new source of stimulus. And when this happens every ten minutes you can't help but complain to the person (if they are close to you) and wish that you'd have a bottle to throw at the person if they're sitting further away.

Another brilliant thing to do is to leave the movie theater in the middle of the movie in disgust. Nothing's better than directly and immediately protesting against the shitty quality of the plot and acting than to march out in protest. That may work in a theater where the actors are present and attempting to perform (and I have to admit that even I haven't dared disrupt theater presentations in this way, even though I've seen quite a few rather appalling ones in my time), but for some odd reason I think the protest is lost on the fact that at movies you don't have a direct feedback channel available to the actors or the producer or the director. So please, fly to California and bitch and moan at them, but please don't do it in the movie theater. The only thing you accomplish is the same that you get when you play with your phone: the other moviegoers will be wishing that someone would decapitate you.

It's funny since I recall that I've bitched and moaned about these things before. But all seems to not be lost yet as the people playing with their phones seem to know on some level that they're doing something wrong. Or at least I get this feeling when I tell them to lose the phone and shut up. In my experience everyone thus far has put their phones away without trouble. Maybe it's because we Finns inherently adhere to rules or maybe it's because I look scary or something. But from my point of view it doesn't matter what the reason is as long as it continues to work in the future as well.

Alfa

On microblogging and such

Antti, a friend of mine, was recently writing about the issues with micro-blogging services like Twitter. He also reflected his own personal usage and identified the requirement to commit oneself to the micro-blogging as of the single biggest issues for him and the services in general. I see the point, but do not necessarily agree on the potential impact that it has for the systems.

Social software like blogs and social networking sites do require some level of activity. If I don't blog anything here for a while, the few readers that this blog has will disappear. I disagree, however, with the notion that the commitment needs to be that big. Even less so with sites like Twitter. If I don't post anything in a while, it doesn't really matter: I might be away from network connectivity or something similar, but I doubt that people would send search parties to find me. I can't help but feel that Antti's example is not necessarily that realistic. The real value from these services comes from the network externalities. The more friends you have using the systems the more you get from them in the form of updates and such. Even if you're not too active yourself, you can still follow what other people are doing. And when you do post something yourself, you're contributing something to the system, making it that much more valuable.

Now, the systems do indeed require activity, but for me this activity comes from intrinsic motivators. I don't blog for others; I blog for myself. I may update my Facebook status or send a tweet to notify other people, but again I do this out of free will, not because I feel that I have to do so. Antti does, however, brush upon one point that is relevant here: if you feel that you "have to" update your blog and if you are driven by external motivators, you are of course a lot more likely to stop blogging and using Twitter than if you were doing it for yourself instead of other people.

While most of the social software these days does benefit from network externalities, I do feel that there is one very tangible threat around the corner. While technically the more information that goes through the network has traditionally meant more value for each node of the network, the same problem lurks nearby that Google has been tackling for the World Wide Web since the mid-90s: creating some sense into the chaos of information tidbits. So the risk is that as our social links go increasingly online, there need to be proper tools to filter and manage the information that spreads in the network. A fine and very tangible example of this is the Facebook phenomenon of quizes: many people feel a need to fill out tons of different quizes to supposedly learn something interesting about themselves. These quiz notifications go out to all of the friends in the network, but even with some hundred contacts the problem is easily that the quiz notifications drown all the other signals in the network and thus actually reduce the value of the network by increasing the noise level and making it more difficult for me to pick up the signals that interest me.