Bubbleweave

I wanted to try the short cappuccino after reading about it in one of Tim Harford’s books, one of which involves the hidden drink option in Starbucks, which resembles an easter egg in that many people do not know about it. So I finally had some time to try about it and found a Starbucks and ordered a short cappuccino. While I was expecting a cheaper price it turned out only to be 10% cheaper at that particular location.

Part of it is to ensure that Starbucks is able to capture those who are more price sensitive while keeping prices high for the lay person.

This price discrimination allows them to capture more profits in. But whether you can use the short cappuccino depends on how much the discount is in your particular Starbucks coffee place! The price is also off the menu, so you wouldn’t know unless you asked. I personally found 10% off an insufficient incentive as there are other high quality competition around ;P

I suppose when I next travel I would try to hit some starbucks and see if they have any short cappuccinos or other drinks.

There are also other intriguing parallels that could be made. But that could be left for another time.

Spoiler Alert!

This anime certainly has many parallels.

Just like in the show where Singapore was wiped out by the C wave, the August monday after the S&P USA downgrade certainly did a number on stock indices around the world. It seems that Singapore’s STI hit a 5% drop before rebounding back up to close at 3.7% perhaps possibly through government intervention via plunge protection teams.

The cards they used are like credit card tiers. The basic normal card followed by a gold card and then the platinum and finally the Black card that both the protaganist and antagonist have.

What I really like is the concept about credit, borrowing and debt. What they do in the show when they use the Midas credit card is to borrow from the future. I think this is an apt conceptual analogue to credit in real life.

What you really do is draw money from your future. Or perhaps you could be drawing other stuff. Take the person who has to work late shifts and long hours for more money to support his family, he is drawing money from his future health and medical bills to pay for his family today in the hope that the math works. That the returns from today will surpass the costs in the future.

Many other things falls into the same analogy. Perhaps at some point we should ask ourselves, is drawing upon this future of ours worth it? Perhaps we should return some of the credit we have overdrawn from the future and reduce the interest or eventual toll we would have to pay.

I was reading

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/want-smack-down-criminal-global-banking-cartel-here%E2%80%99s-how-use-gold-silver-do-it

and i was struck by how similar it was to current predicaments.

Quote: Thus, our “modern” fiat currency system literally destroys any chance to achieve sustainable economic efficiency. If a businessman works harder to earn 17.65% more money than last year, but that 17.65% boost in the nominal amount of money only enables him to purchase the exact same goods and services as last year due to an annual 15% inflation rate ($117,647 * 85% = $100,000), at some point and time, the destruction of efficiency that our fiat currency system imposes upon all businesses will inevitably lead to business contraction instead of sustainable business growth. 

Having an online based business the problem is very similar in that the currency inflows are USD which is going down in value but costs outflows are going up in that the value of usd has dropped and the raw inputs you can get with the same amount of money is sharply going down. So the brain really feels more reluctant to dedicate additional capital and efforts to make money that gets devalued at a faster rate.

It becomes more economically prudent to quickly divest inflows into investments that scales with inflation instead of ‘working harder’ to make less money.

On reading the book it certainly does put the April harvard Business Review issue in a rather different light as to failures.

After recently attending a talk by Tim Harford, who was one the circuit making his rounds for his new book Adapt, here are some gems that he dished out that is worth sharing. (He has also written the best selling book: the undercover economist)

3 Criteria for effective failing

1) Fail more, fail many times and fail faster.
He talked about being invited to google, and when declaring that the way to success was to fail more everyone at google looked at him with a “duh!” face. Of the successes google had there were many many more failures, like Google Wave or the Android 1.0.

2) Fail Small
Keep failing in a way that doesn’t guarantee your doom. Make sure you can survive your failures! This can involve keeping a handle on risks, keeping the money wagered small or doing small projects like google did with their many many failures.

3) Know what is failure and what is success
So you don’t delude yourself which can be pretty bad, just like the banks and the crises.

Exports as a measure of success and failure

For those young people out there, the perks of a university education was that it was a very safe place to fail. And to fail more and at a very high speed. Of course I guess that doesn’t make much difference if university is behind you.

As I write this Silver has closed at $32.6 but that is merely tangential to the events rocketing throughout the world. Bahrain has quickly erupted and Obama is back in his invidious position, perhaps he has a sense of deja vu as another Egypt takes place?

Two disparate events that have a common source.

And that may be the only good thing to have come out of Bernanke’s policies. It would seem that people can remain oppressed from standing up, for their rights, right until the point at which they cannot feed themselves. Ben Ali learnt this as his wife smuggled the nation’s gold off in their plane. Mubarak stonewalled his country as he scurried to divest and secure his fortune of ill gotten gains. He sent police to visit violence on the peaceful stand off taking place, killing many. Their deaths are on his hands. Only when Egypt ground to a stand still, with $360 million losses per day, did the sycophants take heed.

The events have spread throughout the middle east, to Bahrain mentioned earlier where mourners were fired upon. Bernanke’s Weimar inspired printing press has done more for democracy than any ill fated looting attempts by America. The exports of greenback emissions, Twitter, Facebook and social networking tools have worked alchemical wonders in taking down authoritarian, totalitarian, repressive regimes, countries and dictatorships. Will the call for change spread to the asian east? From the oil squeeze in the middle east, what new shortages would arise as hyperinflation of the US dollar spikes food prices that may well cause starvation.

Strike out their ability to speak, and you may have tiananmen, but if their stomachs and their dependent’s stomachs too start starving, the Mubaraks that have grown to be oversized pimples would have outstayed their outcome and finally be popped.

As JF Kennedy once said:

Those that make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich

The irony…

Stumbling around across the world, one thing you notice about many countries is that they would have a Chinatown. A place where the migrant chinese who from China had left for all around the world, forming tiny places in other countries along the globe.

Recently, I have had the delight of visiting Bangkok’s Chinatown in the country of Thailand.

Upon getting off the bus, you can see quite a bit of the roadside seafood eateries that this place is well known for.

Here is one of the local fare, Thai River Prawns with a characteristic big head and a smaller body with claws. They also make a mean plate of oyster omelet.

You can see that those claws are blue as no one would eat them, thus saving the need to cook them!

Exiting the area you can see many small individual stores offering really cheap food! They cost about $1 usd to $2 usd for a meal. They range from many different things like desserts of Bird’s Nest to some Intestine and liver soup that is real peppery, to long stemmed or was it long necked durians.

There were also some form of lanterns overhanging certain roads, but I am unsure as to what their purpose is. I did not have the chance to ask, but it was a sight.

They also have quite unconventional greeting mascots.

I’m guessing that is an alligator skin perhaps stuffed with items to prop it up. No, I did not try crocodile or alligator meat while I was there.

Ended with another meal at another roadside stall which was filled with tourists. The food was pretty good! Each of those fish there would set you back about 6 USD, quite the feast for the dollar! It is fried on the outside but still retains its juiciness on the inside.

What do you want to do with your life?

A study of college under-graduates showed that those who made a plan for their life during or before college, even if it tended towards the skimpy, tended to earn more later in life than those without.

Have you made plans for how you intend to design your lifestyle? Even if you are young, or if you are old and feel pigeonholed into whatever it is you are doing, there is still a chance for you to open the doors to designing your ideal life.

If you are young, by this time you should still have a rough idea of what clicks with you and what doesn’t. Do you intend to make money while wearing pajamas? Then you’re more oriented towards home offices or being your own boss while making use of modern advances in technology and outsourcing to ensure income streams without wearing anything even tending towards a suit and a tie. If you’re feeling old you shouldn’t despair. At this age you should have a much better idea of what you want. Can’t stand going to the office everyday but you have a tidy bag of stocks giving you dividends every declaration? If you’re single you can consider migrating overseas. “Outsource yourself.” The big businesses have done it, and there shouldn’t be anything stopping you.

Purchasing Power Baskets

What seems like a modest revenue stream can translate into a workless life somewhere else. Everyone would know that different countries use different currencies, and some are stronger than others. For example USD 2000 a month would give a person living in the more urban parts of china a lifestyle more commensurate with someone earning 6000 to 8000 usd a month. This is because costs like food can be $1 to $2 for something that would cost $5 back home. It would take a more thorough research of the exact country before obtaining a good gauge of how much it would cost to pack your backs and move over there.

If you gain about $6000 from dividends each year, you could try to find a developing country where your costs runs at about $500 a month. In effect you could move there and not work another day for a while. In this period where you have some kind of freedom from the tedium of life you can invest the time into building more alternative income streams. Ideally by doing what you had always wanted to do in life.

The other possibility would be rather classic. Rent out your house if you own (i.e. paid off the mortgage, assuming you’re middle aged) and live off the rental in some other country. Perhaps your returns on the $250,000 house is about 5% a year which would mean you can have a slim income stream of just about over a $1000 which can translate to a decent employment free living in some other country in Southeast Asia.

As another example, consider that in the Phillipines graduates come out with an expectation of about USD 200 salary a month. Making a few assumptions it should be technically possible to make a decent living in Phillipines if you can maintain a passive revenue stream of about 300 USD a month, and find some way to cover costs of rental or applying for/buying a house there. The cake is sweetened when you consider that speaking, reading and writing only english should be able to get you around in Phillipines! You may have been fired from a company that has outsourced to other countries like New Delhi in India or the factories in China, but you can outsource your living costs too if you are ready to travel! While the actual money you need per month would differ depending on your lifestyle, keep in mind that to have the same salary as a college graduate in phillipines, you only need about $2400 to $3600 a year, which at 5% return on investments would only require a stored capital of about $50,000 to $75,000. This could be stocks that gives out dividends, or a $50,000 house in a US suburb that you will no longer live in because you’ve relocated yourself to the Phillipines. But of course, moving to such a far flung place is not for everyone!

Classic Passive Income
Some people have done well relying on the more traditional means of passive income to fuel their lifestyle design. The advantages of this is that this strategies are well established and time honed. It is less speculative than say creating a new internet platform where it may be a key issue to even find a way to gain an income stream, like the case of youtube or facebook.

Internet Entrepreneurs
For many people who have cracked the web code, traveling the world while periodically checking in on their internet estates has become their ideal lives. Some make anywhere from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of us dollars each month most of which would work pretty much on automation while they sleep. For some other people it requires a bit more active maintenance, which would suit a slightly different kind of lifestyle. Of course, if you require more than what an iphone could do with a café’s wifi, then you might have more practical limits on the places you can travel to while maintaining the income flow. Instead of having rental properties that you can have a property manager handle the pipe fixing for you, it may be more like being retail and dealing with supply issues.

Start with ideal lifestyle you intend to end at, and then work towards it.

If you are looking for the best sites to make gold in the game of WoW, you can try this gold making resource which singles out some of the best sites to learn how to start making gold effortlessly. So far it covers about 3 sites but there is a possibility that it may be expanded upon in the future. It is a brief coverage so you can quickly scan through and pick the one that best suits your present needs.

That said, this isn’t the only blizzard game to have gold, there is Starcraft 2 gold in the form of gold high yield minerals or the gold league rankings.

Then again if one is looking for physical precious metal bullion, you could look at things like Silver Panda Coins.

Fans of the Khuntoria couple on the Korean Show WGM featuring the Thai Nickhun and Chinese Victoria will be excited to know that they will be having a special stage on the Korean Gayo Daegun. It looks to have sparks flying in a tussle (fake and staged) between Nickhun and Victoria that is likely to shape the skit they will be doing on stage.

The link here:

http://www.allkpop.com/2010/12/a-fierce-lovers-quarrel-between-khuntoria-for-mbcs-gayo-daejun

There has been a book that has been out on the market for quite a while called 4 hour work week. Basically its an exploration of modern technologies and how it can lead to you paving the path to being your own boss, only spending 4 hours in a week to manage your business. It talks about things like the internet and drop shipping, and tries to make the topic more accessible to people. It does a decent job at chronicling the writer’s personal experience and this can serve as a source of inspiration for other people looking to do the same and get out of the increasingly debilitating and unstable rat race that shapes the world today and transform their lives for the better. One that runs 4 hours out of 7 days instead of 24/7. It is at least worth a read if you are ready to make the changes today that will change your tomorrow.