Jobs and ethics

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

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

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

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

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

Inches

Dreams

Overconsumption

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

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

Zagat for Finland

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

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

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

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

Meet Ari Gold

Ages and roles and the Marine Corps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why some people play with sharp knives...

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

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

It actually makes sense...

On gifts

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

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

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

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

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

Mission statements

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

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

Small cap, medium cap, large cap

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

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

Eating out

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

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

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

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

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

On rejuvenating a company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First impressions

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.