Fuckedy fuckedy fuck fuck

[Post edited recently, added sections in italics]

I’m an idiot. I readily admit this to anyone who listens. I’ve locked myself out four times already. And each time had to trudge down to Reslife office, pay one dollar, trudge back up to I-House and trudge back down to return the keys. But, I am an innovator, I’m an econ major. I had a failproof method to stop losing my keys- I’ll bloody chain them to my jeans. The only way I can lock myself out is if I leave my jeans in my room and lock the door behind me. I mean its not entirely failproof, after all this is college. I sagely predicted that I would, in my infinite incompetence, lock myself out at least once in two quarters.

It happened the very next day. At 7:00am, I left my room to have a shower (in my PJs). 7:20: I discover my door has slammed itself shut and locked itself. I go downstairs, garbed only in towel and PJs to borrow someone’s phone to phone the RA on duty.I’m actually lucky, I guess. Normally I don’t wear a shirt, so I’d have been bloody freezing.

I’ve done this before, it should only take ten minutes, so I let the door to my suite slam shut behind me.I go to the room of the RA for my building to look up the number. It says on the door: if you are locked out between 1-9pm, phone X. If you are locked out between 9pm-6am phone Y. If you are locked out between 9am and 1pm, go to the Reslife Office. Notice, there is a three hour gap between the two times. Nonetheless, I borrow a phone from Tachi, who is walking to the law and econ class I should be at. “Tachi” I say, “I will return this phone to you in ten minutes when I come to class, I promise.”  I ended up returning it 2 hours later, by leaving it in his room on the coffee table in a pile of junk where he’ll never find it. Sorry Tachi!

So there I am, without shoes or jumper in the morning cold. I phone the number down the bottom. It turns out to be campus police, who obviously tell me to phone the RA on duty. I phone the RA on duty (who is now off duty, as of 6am). She doesn’t pick up, but thankfully her voice mail says she lives n Earth Hall North. I trudge over there to find “Amanda Esa”. No luck. I trudge back, and phone the RA for my building. He’s in class, he’s never heard of an Amanda Esa, and says the RA on duty is Adidtya. I return to EHN to find this Adidtya. No luck.

Thankfully, I am an innovator. I know Corey, who works at the SAC. Unfortunately, Tachi, whose phone I borrowed, does not. I trudge to Asante building and knock on his door. Unfortunately, he lives on the second floor, and noone answers. I trudge to the IR/PS Library to go on facebook to find Corey’s number. God bless facebook. Corey does not have his number on his facebook. Thankfully, I am an innovator. I met Kenneth, Corey’s roommate, for about 5 mins, two weeks ago, in a random situation. But he’s on my facebook, and his number is on facebook. [This is possibly a good thing. If it had not been on his facebook, I may have had to phone his ex to find his number...] I phone Kenneth, about 3 hours earlier than most students wake up (8:15am now… 30 mins after I was first locked out). He blearily answers the phone, and I make a half lame attempt at explaining who I am. I at this point am incoherent with rage (though, my stoic exterior tends to obscure this fact from people, and I was very polite as I am) and eventually just say “um… could I speak to Corey”. Kenneth goes to check. “Oh, his door’s closed, should I wake him up?” I’m hesitant, because Corey’s a nice guy who delivers my packages full of goodies like textbooks and lightbulbs. Eventually I relent to my individually rational side (econ joke) and ask to wake him as well as Kenneth, and my roommates who I’m sure I woke up when I punched my door 5 or 6 times. His door’s locked… he must have gone to class.

Goddamn. But wait, I’m a slippery member of the Labor Party. We’ve got tricks up every sleeve, and I still have one left. I go back and phone the campus police hotline, because apparently they have keys too. they tell me to phone my RA, and leave a message. I then abandon hope. So I just wait 45 mins till the bloody Reslife office opens at 9. It actually opens at 9:15, about 5 minutes before my class ends. But there are no student helpers there, who have keys to the SAC. So I wait another 15 minutes. So… then I get back to my room, and go to return my spare keys after changing into my beloved jeans. Guess who I return it to. It’s bloody Corey. haha. nah, he’s a good guy, we had a nice chat about stuff because I didn’t want to return to my room and study.

But anyway, I was too angry at that point to study, and because I tend to suppress emotions, people tend to not notice that I am angry. But I am, and I could have exploded at the least inconvenience. So I went to the gym to blow off steam, and weak as I am, I get my ass handed to me by a set of ten pound weights (5kg) after just ten minutes. On the way back from the gym, I bump into 4 people I know, and chatted with them all. Sometimes I wish I was antisocial like I was back home. Gods, it was a 200m walk from the gym back home, and 4 people? God, I’m worse than Coleman. Oh then at some point a film crew of about 8 comes to my tiny little room and films my experiences of America. Apparently I gave very different answers to everyone else. And when I asked what that meant, apparently I was the only one who mentioned socialism. Also, at one point I mentioned that I went to a Palin rally, and asked if I could cut that section. Nope. But it was very Palin of me to ask.

Ugh, but this has been a catharctic post. I feel much better now. And hey, throughout it all at least I can say I knew where my towel is.

Edit: I saw this via my facebook news page- some group had this as their picture thing. I thought it seemed appropriate.

[img]http://profile.ak.facebook.com/object3/1175/85/n37900759621_1737.jpg[/img]

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Why I am a Democrat and an economist

[post incomplete, I will come back and edit at some point]

 

 

Ok, so about a month ago I promised that I would mix up the posts a bit, but it seems all I’ve done is talk about my terribly boring life. So this weekend was rather uneventful , so I can can the time to forcefeed you all my opinion on the topic de jour. I think the only worthwhile thing mentioning is how I successfully defended a child murderer from prosecution before the ICC at MUN. Good times.

(BTW, I will be mixing up future posts a bit more, as I should have more free time now that the rush week for fraternities is over, and now that I have a laptop. I plan on uploading that 4GB of holiday photos soon.) So here we go:

We are in a terrible age of protectionist sentiment. Even the republicans are supporting a massive waste of taxpayers money. The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics has been awarded to a protectionist. An intelligent protectionist (one of the few) to be sure, but the outlook remains dim, methinks. So I’m going to do something I don’t often do, and that’s advocate for economic ideology. I’m going to explain why free trade still makes sense, and why more Democrats should get on board.

1. Free trade is not deregulation, and is protecting us from the credit crisis

Deregulation is sometimes good, and sometimes bad. When you have deregulated your financial sector to the point where your regulators are publicly traded companies seeking a profit, like Fannie and Freddie, you’ve got problems. Free trade, that is the removal of trade barriers which exist for purely commercial reasons, is good deregulation. If we go further and remove trade barriers which exist for other perfectly legit reasons like quarantine, then of course it is bad, and it is worse if it undermines stuff like minimum labour conditions. But essentially, free trade is good and its more or less what is protecting us from a global collapse.

For the longest time, we did not think Australia would be severely affected by the credit crisis because we would be lifted up by China and the asian economies. It turns out the decoupling argument is not as strong as predicted (I know this because the Aus econ did go downwards and I got about $100 less off my currency exchange than I should have). But the fact decoupling was imperfect does not mean it does not exist. Let me tell you, conditions in Australia are much better than America right now. So many banks are collapsing its ridiculous. I don;t think Aus has had any banks collapse yet (I may be wrong, I haven;t read the news in 3 months). Europe is getting hit really hard, in fact harder than America. The Euro hit record lows whilst I was there. Do you know why? Because they’re stuck in a single-currency trading bloc. Its free trade within the Eurozone, but essentially its like a giant protectionist fortress as against the rest of the world. When the credit crisis hit, the poorer/slower countries in Europe dragged down the rest as the inflexible monetary policy failed to halt the economy. Get the hint? Australia has diverse terms of trade, with the asian economies, as well as with America and to a lesser extent Europe. Europe, as a internal trading bloc, was not diversified. Its ossified protectionist financial system withstood the pressure even less than America where the plague began.

So how does free trade help? Free trade is an equaliser in the long run. It breaks down competitive advantages within countries as countries jockey for top position in feach industry such as film (see the resurgance of Bollywood in the UK). Even in the short run, we can see the benefits of diversification, which are the only thing preventing a global depression. China is slowed- from about 20% growth to only about 10% I believe, but that is enough to keep the rest of Asia buoyant. China pumps enough money into Asia that those economies in turn do not plunge into recession, and hence can trade with other countries and keep them buoyant. If we had a protectionist system, we could have no doubt that America would remain the top trading force in the world, and we would have crashed with it. Protectionism- aside from absolute isolationism- could not prevent trade. Money will change hands somehow between countries, the question is merely what price is paid for the transaction. The credit crisis would still have hit, but every country would be so closely tied to America that they would have been dragged down.

So free trade, far from being a force for evil, is protecting our economies from isolated damage. If we had adopted freer policies earlier, decoupling might ha:ve worked in its entirety.

2. Free trade is good for the poor starving Africans:

Ok, so we’ve had plenty of bashing of free trade and equality for a long time now, but is there an argument for free trade and equity? I think there is. One thing I can’t understand is why lefties refuse to accept economics as a fact rather than an argument to rail against. They always making up obverse arguments which are absolute twaddle like how its oil companies seeking to exploit Africans in some racist manner. Let me ask you this question- if working for a multinational was not better for that worker, why would s/he do it? Of course it makes them better off. They may be paid peanuts, but peanuts are still full of protein. Let me put it another way. Yes, I would prefer they would be paid a “fair” wage, but we all know that that would destroy every incentive to outsource to that Asias.

Heaven forfend!

Now, most of my recent posts seem to be about meeting these amazing famous people, or going to amazing events. But is that really all that exotic for me? I mean come on, I’ve met ministers etc before at ALP shindigs, so me meeting C-list celebrities isn’t that surprising.

But here are some things that you would not expect to happen to me at all:

1) I did not complete a graded homework set: Ok, so I complete ungraded homework on the bus all the time- you guys know this about me, but I don’t think I’ve ever failed to complete a graded homework set. For most people, it would be wholly unremarkable. But this is me we’re talking about. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even been sleeping. I started getting worried when the syllabus said it shouldn’t take us more than 5-6 hours to do this homework. But then I forgot about it. Until my maths lecture when the lecturer said we could hand it in then, or at the drop-off box before 3pm. Then I went to another lecture and forgot about it. Then I remembered again at 2pm. So I ran off to the library to borrow the textbook (still haven’t bought the damned thing) and started doing it. Then I read the due-date on the homework. It was Fri Oct 17… the next week. I’d done the bloody next week’s homework. So I printed it off and had half an hour to do 6 hours of work. I almost got there. It was completely illegible, but I’d done Q1,2,4 and about 60% of q3 by the time I got there. I was scribbling q3 on the lift on the way to the dropbox and the lift was somewhat faster than expected. So there we go. America is corrupting me already.

2) I own a legitimate Windows CD. Isn’t that remarkable? Now I’m not one of those communist/homosexuals with a Mac fetish, but who seriously owns a copy of Windows? You get it with your computer (then illegally download XP to replace the shoddy Windows Vista they gave you). Noone actually buys it, so noone actually has a CD…

Yeah, I went to see Craig Mundie (Bill Gates’ successor at Evil Corp) speaking. Apparently he’s taken over Bill Gates’ tradition of setting aside one week a year to tour universities and chat with students and faculty. And I won a copy of Vista in the raffle. Really brilliant guy. I’ll probably write a blog post on it some time. But probably not because I am so ridiculously busy. I’ve what? promised a blog on the republican convention, the palin rally and several other things now, and done none of it. Meh.

3) A girl said I had “natural charisma”. I’m not even going to give any context for that quote. In any context it is ridiculous and hilarious. Me. haha, I actually burst out laughing when she said it, which I guess is a tiny bit mean. But I honestly couldn’t help myself. My friend is convinced its because I have an awesome accent.

So there you go. By the time I return to Australia, none of you are going to recognise me. I’ll be a Fosters-drinking, sport-loving surfie.

Inefficiency

So, this morning I discovered that for once I had some free time, so maybe I could get around to sleeping, or maybe doing that homework I just discovered that I have. Alas no. Instead, I have definitive proof that America is now run by communist cadres masquarading as large companies. You know of course who to blame- Che Guerrero, the mass murderer and T-shirt mogul. They celebrate Che Day here at UCSD. How ridiculous is that? And there’s a co-op Che Cafe in the southern part of campus, which doesn’t serve vegetarian food. Only vegan food. God shrieve our souls.

So what proof do I have that the greatest nation on Earth is falling into disarray (aside from Dub-ya’s “election”) First, I have lost 4 packages so far, and only received one. And that one package was international… the others were all local SD. WTF? Amazon sent me two packages, the website tells me they arrived last Friday and last Monday. I have received no notification either by e-mail, or by mailbox of such packages. I go to the Residential Life office, and phone the Mailing Services. They have absolutely no record of any packages. They search a little more. They find a record of the package I already received, but still no sign of the first two packages.

Then my laptop and printer/scanner from Frys Electronics. I check the website, status: “processing request.” I bloody bought the thing a week ago. I phone them up. It turns out they’d been waiting for me to scan then e-mail ID to them since I used a foreign credit card. Why? They never bloody notified me that they weredelaying sending. I’m buying my bloody scanner from you tools. How am I meant to scan it? So I get them to charge my American debit card, and demand that they ship it to me immediately, and that they pay shipping costs. She has to talk to a supervisor, leaving me on hold for twenty minutes. In fact, so long that my phone disconnects automatically. I phone back, and she’s gone off to lunch. Then I get a phone call back, and it turns out they can’t input my billing address properly because its a mailbox and I have to run home and find a Bank of America statement to find out exactly how to write my billing address. But at least I got free shipping.

Speaking of my Bank of America card, where the hell is it? I opened the account on Sept 17. It’s meant to arrive 3-5 business days from when its finished processing (Sept 22). Its now bloody October. So yesterday I went to yell at Bank of America who had the nerve to tell me that it was actually 10 business days. They eventually cancelled the first card, and issued me a temporary card whilst my second card is sent to me. We all know that it will go the way of the Mary Celeste.
How the hell did a country whose businesspeople are this incompetent ever become the economic powerhoues of the world? They should take a queue from us Australians. We walk into meetings for ten minutes, become liaisons to committees with fancy names like the Council of Organisations, or get invited to lunch with CEOs of investment banks. Why do I even need a degree? Pfft, attend 5 minutes of a interview and I’m in.

Efficiency is embedded in the Australian culture. Some think we just drink the day away. But what do we do whilst drinking “Fosters” all day? We multi-task. We can feed crocodiles and rear children at the same time. In fact, little Bob Irwin got his first “take your son to work day” at the age of 1. The word “Good” may be replaced by G’. We don’t need to remember names, just call everyone “mate”. Not quite the laidback stereotype everyone thinks of Aussies as.

But we do love our beer and our beaches. That’s why I’m moving to Canada.

Efficiency

Man, I have been so busy this week. I have literally been quadruple booked every night this week so far. Ok, I lie- I was quintuple booked on Wednesday. On the bright side, I’ve really been getting things done. For instance, I went into a meeting on Monday, and in ten minutes, landed a job as liaison to some committee. On Wed, I went to another meeting and landed myself a lunch with the CEO of Brandes Investments (only 2 spots open).

Ok, so I’ll elaborate a bit: on Monday night I went to an info session for Omicron DE, the International (ie both the US AND Canada) Honours Soc for Econ at 5. At 6, I headed over to the Price Center for info on Rush (the process for joining a social frat). At 6:30, I headed back home to get changed into a suit for an info night for Alpha Kappa Psi, the pre-business fraternity. I had about 10 minutes to spare before the 7pm meeting, so I went to the I-Cares meeting which was in the lounge below my apartment. I-Cares is some sort of community service org for International House. I think. I missed the first meeting, where they explained what they actually do. So I walked in, dressed in like my full business suit, still doing up my tie. Everyone sort of stared at me (its 30C outside during the day, though it’d cooled by then). Then the leader person asked if anyone wanted to do some job. Noone volunteered, so I did. Then other people volunteered. Of course, I had no real idea what I was signing up for, so they explained it to me. I then left the room, and found out the next day that I was selected… despite not having been in the room when they picked who would be the liaison. My job is to attend I-Cares meetings and explain what I-Cares does to other organisations on campus aat the “Council of Organisations” and to co-ordinate with them on stuff. So in summary, my job is to attend (the whole of) I-Cares meetings, and to know what they are/do. And as I said above, I know neither. (Let me warn you though, volunteering can get you in trouble. This weekend is now filled because I volunteered to help Model UN out by defending the Congo in the mock ICC for some event for high schoolers.)

So Wed. There was a resume/case study workshop held by Delta Sigma Pi, the other pre-business frat on campus. So at 6:25 I went to the computer lab to print my resume from my USB. My USB did not work (you guys know there’s 3GB of pictures on there, along with critical documents like passport photocopies and my study notes). Good times. I spent ten minutes typing up my resume. Good. Went to the workshop, which thankfully was half-an hour later than advertised. My resume got praised for how well it was written. Apparently Americans like really concise resumes (1 page limit generally), so my 10 min job was probably better than most others in the room. lol. Then at 7:20, I went to the Undergrad Investment Soc’s info night. I walked in just as they were finishing off some speech and about to hold a competition for two spots at a luncheon with Brandes Investments. Two questions, two places. I almost guessed the first question: “What two factors do fundamental analysis enthusiasts care about?” (unlimited guesses, first guess was future earnings and growth prospects, second guess was earnings and share price. The answer was earnings and book value. I was the first to get “earnings” as the answer). Second question was the one I answered, “explain what is fundamental analysis”, which in retrospect was a fairly easy question. I basically answered “oh no! market explode, panic selling so undervalued. In LR, the stock will return to intrinsic value and Warren Buffet/Bill Gates makes billions. Then gives it away for some inexplicably irrational reason.” Good times.  Then I talked to a few people, actually signed up for the UIS, then left for another resume workshop held by the Alpha Kappas twenty minutes after I walked into the UIS meeting half an hour late, with no idea who they were. I guess I’ll have to find out who UIS are. And who Brandes Investments are. Apparently they’re quite big (with $85 billion in investments) and I scored quite a coup. rofl

So there’s efficiency for you. It feels good considering I still havne’t properly enrolled in all my classes, haven’t got textbooks or a laptop yet, or discovered how to even find out what homework I have. I love being me.

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