Under the name charity

People always find a way to indulge themselves. For instance, people are holding charity "dinner/lunch" under the name of China Earthquake Relief. I think that's a great idea of generating revenue and publicity.

个人终究是渺小的

最近在看凤凰卫视的纪录片，从康梁变法到辛亥革命，从蒋家日记到200万人迁徙台湾。这些从另一个角度看中国近现代史的机会，让我再次体会到个人的渺小。

思想开明，主张立宪的袁世凯，最终却复辟称帝。
红色将军蒋介石，为了保住自己的王朝，落到一代枭雄的恶名。
在狱中写下"引刀成一快，不负少年头"的汪精卫，成了日本人的傀儡。
经时济世，领袖群伦的蒋经国，从一个纯粹的共产党员(到被自己的苏联老师称为"天真")，变成不惜滥杀无辜以儆效尤的特务头子。
李登辉，原是以领导共产主义游行出身，以反对台湾独立获得蒋经国青睐，最后却用台独势力终结了国民党对台湾的统治。

我相信他们年轻时的激情与真诚，残酷的政治斗争，使人异化到背叛自己，身不由己。

唯有梁启超，蔡锷，真正可以做到功成身退。

sales force

It's exciting to be a sales person, especially when the product I am selling is human resource. How to navigate the job postings, how to find the key person in the hiring process and how to package a candidate to grab the attention of the hiring manager are arts of their own. Of course, the bottom line is the candidate has strong credentials.

Sales skills are most essential to survive in the ever changing job market.

USO down

Right after I dump all shares in USO. It's down 1.97% today. I think another buy-in point will be around $85, if the price ever drop to that level. The capital gain tax has eaten away half of my profit. I wish I had moved more asset into my Roth IRA.

what will be the next sector that becomes commodity?

When customer cares about cost more than brand name, the product becomes commodity. The commoditization of a market is usually the opportunity for new-comer to beat the incumbent.

Camera becomes commodity when Japanese optical shops became camera makers (Canon, Nikon, Olympus) in 1930s. Leica, Kodak eventually lose the market.

Copy machine becomes commodity when Xerox patents expired in the 1980s, and Canon, Epson, after eating the low-end market, eventually took the majority of the whole market.

PC has become commodity since Dell took the market (HP is now the leading competitor). Webstore has become commodity since eBay is around (Amazon marketplace is the leading competitor).
Ironically both HP and Amazon was the market leader when those two sector were still "hi-tech" instead of commodity.

Cloud computing is at the verge of transfroming from "hi-tech" to commodity (Amazon EC2, Google App engine, MS live mesh). Sun, who came up with the slogon "the Network is the Computer" about 9 years ago, has lagged behind. Their Grid Computing in 2006 failed because of compatibility, and lack of on-demand storage solution to bundle with. They recently launched "Hydrazine" to catch up in this area that they pioneered. IBM, who commercialized computing on-demand using their mainframe is trying to lower the cost by borrowing PC-based technology from Google. IBM survived largely because their strong foothold government and defense market.

Search is still considered "hi-tech", although the technology itself has been quite mature (scalability is the real entry-bar now).
OS is still considered "hi-tech", although "free" Linux has beaten MS in the server market. MS still owns enough desktop OS market to survive. 

That's a lot of jargons to swallow if you aren't following these things. But my gist is the following:
Innovators usually miss the trend when their own invention becomes commodity. Their technical advantage can't beat competition from the low-cost competitors. They sometimes were able to catch up in the low-cost war (e.g. Amazon and HP), sometimes not (e.g. Leica, Kodak, Xerox, Sun, IBM).

So what will become the next sector?
Is it mass media? (newspaper, TV replaced by online media) Or publishing?

我也看了《立春》

高雅艺术之所以难以生存，是因为market非常小，只有top 1%能在自己追求的艺术中，得到养活自己的收入。只有top 0.1%的人，可以像Yoyo Ma, Maria Callas 那样成功。

在这样一个高风险，低回报的行业里，想要获得世俗的价值观的认同，必然是悲剧。

 

另一方面，艺术最早是源于宗教的，这也决定了它和中国的现有体制是不兼容的。 

stupid patents

Having filed > 12 patents myself, I can't help ridiculing the intellectual property law. But patent attorney Stephen Kinsella did a even better job using real-world examples.

The fun part starts at about 7:32 min.

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USO dumped at $101.79

USO is going crazy when it closed at 100.66 yesterday, but today's rise even crazier (close at >$102). Such a historical high price won't be sustainable. I think USO will drop back to around $97 in the near future.
My limit order kicks in and cashed out most of my USO.

GLD has finished its worst correction. I am expecting another round of strong rebound.

The world of commodity ETF is having such a roller coaster ride, that it's impossible to hold anything as a gain keeper.

lunch with a global sourcing mgr

My take home message is:
 The age of trading company is over, because retailers are directly sourcing from the manufacturers. The only way for a small guy to profit from global trade is to design a new product, find someone to manufacture it in Asia, find someone to buy it in US, and profit from the IP.
The transition from tech line to business line can be done through understanding the business behind all the tech projects. (this is in synch with what my mentor told me: every company is in need of a tech person that understands the business)
The risk of being in the business line is if the business sector doesn't do well, the whole org will be slashed. Although that probably applies to the tech guy, too.

USO price shooting over $100

I think I am going to cash out now. That's way to high for my take, even under current market condition.
There is gonna be a lot of profit-taking tomorrow if the price ever reach $101. So I am shooting for $100.90

A forgotten war: Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995

If it were not for the movie "Life is a Miracle", I would have forgotten the war between Serbs and Muslim inhabitants in Gorazde. How neighbors can suddenly turn into enemy and how enemy hostage can turn into lovers.

Much of the human atrocity has been animated under the name of race, religeon and idealism. Yet violence (verbal or physical) is the single point of the evidence that defines the line between good and evil, between justice and wicked.

 

When I watch action movies as a kid, I always wondered why the super-hero will not kill the evil guy, even if he dominated in the combat. The truth is, if he killed the bad guy, he will become the same as the bad guy, only a bit stronger.

Justice can never be earned through violence, and once a rebel becomes violent, it becomes the same evil force that is orginally stands to oppose, only not as powerful as the incumbent.

strategize over respond

Today KUOW aired an interview with Ivan Marovic of Otpor, the Serbian resistance movement that played a critical role in ousting Slobodan Milosevic. He talked about a non-violent strategic game that he helped developing (called A Force More Powerful). The game is currently used by grass-root activists groups around the world to train their leaders.

One example in the game that Ivan mentioned mentioned, was to not to responde to your component (i.e. the computer AI dictator). His reasoning is 

1) If you responde, you become part of your opponent's strategy, which will only play against you.

2) It's hard to effectively responde in a very short period of time

3) You need to develop your own strategy, which shouldn't be distracted by what your opponent do.

 

Another examplar teaching built in the game is that there are 2 threshold. One is dictator awareness: before the movement reaches that threshold, you mainly recruiting and raising fund, keeping your actions secrete, so that the dictator wouldn't be able to quench you. Once you go on the street and began handing out fliers, you went over the "awareness" threshold, and officially declare the nonviolent "war" against the dictator.

The other threshold is "threaten", where the dictator begin to feel threatened by your movement. This is when your movement gather more supporters and grow larger in scale, that really threatens the regime. Once you cross that threshold, the dictator will use extreme action to kill the movement (like assasination, exile, blackmail).

 

It's interesting how gcd will react to such tutorial, because their political science book used to teach people how gcd carried on underground movement before 1949. As the current incumbent, they probably wouldn't want to many people to follow their recipe.

 

 

Thanks to MEND, I beat the market in USO

The weekend attack in Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil
producer, forced Royal Dutch Shell Plc to reduce output, the
Associated Press reported May 3, citing the company. The Nigerian
Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND,
claimed responsibility for the assault.
The attacks ``could take more oil off the market,'' said
James Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch & Associates, in
Galena, Illinois.

Brent crude oil for June settlement rose $3.43, or 3
percent, to a record close of $117.99 a barrel on London's ICE
Futures Europe exchange. Prices rose to an intraday high of
$118.58 a barrel today.

Oil prices were expected to fall this week according to 14,
or 61 percent, of 23 analysts surveyed May 1 by Bloomberg News.

Hedge-fund managers and other large speculators reduced bets
on rising oil prices for the first time in four weeks, the U.S.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission said May 2.

Net-long positions in New York oil futures, the difference
between contracts to buy and sell the commodity, fell 24 percent
to 53,311 contracts in the week ended April 29.

烟花的形状

 

岩井俊二的《烟花》提出问题：烟花的形状，到底是圆的还是扁的？

经过我的一番research, 结论如下：

“大部分的shell都是球形的(spherical), 使用现代的特殊设计，可以作出扁的(circular)，但是电影中的那个时代(1993)，地点(日本海边小镇)的烟花，应该还没有那么先进。”

 

所以，正确答案是“那天那里放的烟花是圆的”。

can't outsmart the market

Dow continues to hike, for some strange reason that's beyond me.

It's stupid of me to even trade ETF, since any short term captal grain will result in 40% tax. It's like lose is on me, win is for the government. 

 

Rather than betting my savings to feed Uncle Sam, I went to enjoy Roman art in another SAM, Seattle Art Museum, after having happy hours in Brasa.

 

From a historic point view, we are enjoying a material life that even Roman Emperors can't even imagine, thanks to industrialization. At the same time, the government and social structure deteriorated. Modern democracy is modeling Roman Empire in many ways: senator, congress, candidates, citizen, tax system, even immigration (free people of foreign nationality will sell themselves as Roman slaves in hope to one day be converted to Roman citizen. How similar is that to immigrates in US!) 

 

Looking at the residue of the Roman empire, listening to US politicians comments in the audio guide, I can't help wondering, just when they mesmerize at the minor announcement of Emperor Nero becoming historic item after 2000 years, how do they know that their trivial comments wouldn't be put into the history in 4023 AD with a side-note "some US senator commented on Emperor Nero at the dawn of Empire US"?