UltraCrepidate

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!! I was shocked when I saw this. Even though I am nearing the completion of the secret project and should be focusing on that instead, the implication of this refusal is too big for me to remain calm. This is very bad.

The worst of my predictions are coming true one by one, the failure cascade has been set in motion and with this decision, it can no longer be contained. We are entering a period of cash hoarding and capital preservation. Basically, the denial of the $700 billion cash injection means one thing: Freezing of all loans and credits.

Unlike what TVs, DIGG and REDDIT or any news outlet has been pitching to the population. This bailout is not about punishing wall street or investors who gambled. It’s about preventing them from going into cash hoarding mode so that normal people like YOU AND ME can continue our little life like normal. If all you can see right now is how to teach them a lesson… well, understand that the lesson will come back to kick you in the butt too. You cannot decimate the wealthy without the poor taking an even greater sacrifice.

Before that, please have a look at this video it explains the current monetary system. In sum, the bankruptcy rate is maintained at a low level by the annual creation of credit (inflation) to pay yesteryear’s loan interest.

For the file and rank employee

That said, here’s how my train of thought goes when thinking about a freezing of credit market. Loans are made to businesses to facilitate the day to day operation of a company so that they can work on 120% of the capital and hire more employee to expand the business. When you take about that 20% of leverage of most companies, they will be forced to come up with a way to pay the loan back (as banks stops lending) or in a desperate situation, accept inexcusable terms to keep themselves from having to pay the total capital back (usually resulting to bankruptcy in the end).

The end result of this means that pink slips are going to be delivered and people’s heads will start to roll. For most small businesses, the owners can usually just fold themselves without any repercussion (If it is incorporated) because all the loans are entitled under the corporation entity. Maybe less easy on the big business, but it will end up being the same thing if this continues long enough. The ultimate losers in the situation are your file and rank employees.

Now the firms that actually have enough cash hoards to weather this will not be hiring new people due to a reduction in demand of material goods from a reduction in employment. Even healthy companies that did not borrow to expand might close down due to a lack of demand. The question you have to ask yourself is this am I ok with losing my job?

The responsible savers

You will have to start playing the “Guess which bank is going to fail next” game. Chances are, it’ll fail and when it fails, you are only insured for $100,000. Ask wallstreet and see how many of them see their $1 million reduced to $100,000 in one night.

Pensions? Guess what, they invest in all these big banks that just failed. Why don’t you call up your fund manager and ask how much you’ve lost and if you should keep on working because your pension fund is now worth nothing.

RRSP? 401k? Yep that got decimated too. Well, that is if you invest in mutual funds anyway. If not, then you also have to play the “Guess which bank will fail next”. Rest assured that when the cascade of failures start, FDIC will be tapped out of their reserves and they will have to go to the government for an infusion of money… Oh wait, you just blocked that $700 billion infusion of cash. Tough luck then.

The home buyers

Ditto. You were already in shit, now the fire sale of properties will make you go into even deeper shit.

The winners

The “living pay check to paycheck” crowd. No savings no anything and converted all their cash to material objects. Which is probably the best investment strategy ever at this moment.

Return of the troops

I don’t think it’s wise to bring back your troops during a great depression. However if things goes according to schedule, the time for troop’s eventual return trip to home will coincide with the peak of the depression. Get a bunch of hardened trigger happy soldier coming back home with nothing to do and you get dissent, resentment, not to mention over breeding.

Student

Nope, you are not insulated either. That student loan that’s been supporting you? Well, you won’t be getting one next year and since you can’t go to school without the loan, you will eventually become a non-student, at which time you will be required to pay it back.

The worst case

2nd Great depression is about 70% likely and riots about 50% but since my worst case scenarios have been coming true, here’s my recommendation. Stock up on food, buy a shot gun with lots of bullets and convert the rest of the money into gold for the eventual return of civilization.

My first date with cultural shock was quite harsh. I wasn’t slowly introduced into the culture. Didn’t join any program for temporary stay where other foreigners are with me. I was dumped in it, balls first. It won’t be surprising to you then if I tell you that the first and most vivid memory of the alien culture (and still remains so because of the sense of hopelessness I felt afterwards) happened on one fateful day in Auckland, New Zealand. An interaction between me and my first English teacher in an English classroom.

She was repeating her name time and time again in front of the class and forcing me to do the same. I kept trying to the best of my ability until I can’t tell why she asks me to keep on repeating even though it seems that I had already got the name right. The whole class was watching I felt embarrassed at failing such a simple task.

“Mrs. Hanneck” I’d say
“No, it’s Mrs. H a n n e c k” She’d repeat impatiently.

There must be some intonation that I can’t hear, or some sound that is hidden from my ear because it doesn’t exist in the culture that I was born into. So this is how it happened for me. Nothing exotic, pas romantique, nicht leicht. Quite traumatic if you ask me.

How did she look at me back then? Did she think I was stupid? Was I nothing but annoyance for her? What goes on in an adult’s mind in this situation?

The problem is beautiful in its own right. It combined both death and birth. Everything that constituted me died that day giving way to the birth of a new self. It played a major role in shaping the “all or none” approach I later adopted in life. For me, this is how transition have always worked.

It doesn’t happen often, but it happened enough times that I have to stop ignoring it and face it with my full attention. The seemingly random occasions when I can hear and reproduces sounds of the words spoken by people but fails to comprehend the meaning. Or, in most cases, fails to grasp the correct meaning. It happens more often when I am with people I am really close to.

The mentat side of me deducted the facts and came up with an interesting theory which I am ready to entertain for a while. The fact that I try to predict what people are going to say based on the context and the situation at that time. Whenever someone suddenly go outside of the predicted outcomes, I will have trouble hearing the words.

From the perspective of a person trying to build a comfortable life nowadays, the fact that my family emigrated to a new country means my life planning will be drastically different. For the record, I am a typical Asian working in the field of engineering. It’s not a career that I aspired to when I was small and I am the first one out of all members of my family tree to become an Engineer. My blood is that of artists and salesmen.

My dad sat me down one day during the frenzy of preparing for finals and applying for the program I want to talk about my career. I believe that up until that point, I’ve exhibited a preference towards art and acting. The genes from my mother’s side. In Taiwan, I excelled at it and was reinforced by my peers that I am very good at both. I believed in that fact myself. You can see the same result from my grades. I wasn’t that good at math like your stereotypical Asian guy.

What he told me was this: “You are an immigrant and that is a fact. You cannot plan your life ignoring the biggest change that has happened to you so far. You need to ask yourself, what can you do that is naturally better than the people who were raised here so you are not always playing catch up.”

“Lawyer? Actor? Can you out-talk a local in French? In English?”

My father showed me some of his frustration as well: “I learned a new word today at the age of 40, it’s called conspiracy (Excruciating and slow attempt at pronouncing the word, we are not good with words that have more than 3 syllables). People here grow up knowing what that word mean. How can you expect to beat them at their own game which they’ve been playing far longer than you?”

“Let’s say that you can. What do you think will happen when a white CEO is trying to decide between a white and an yellow guy when both are equally qualified and with the exact same background? White of course. Wouldn’t you choose your own kind as well? Don’t you think it will be even worse in other fields where the results are more subjective?”

That, is what I call “shattering of dreams” in my life. The moment when I realized the difference and admit that it exists. This “difference” continued to co-exist inside me on a day to day basis as I see the other world’s reality whenever an event happened in the wrold I live in. This “other world” of the yellow culture that continues to give me insight to what could’ve happened differently and provides ironic comedy to what would’ve been otherwise a perfectly normal assumption on normality.

Disclosure: I own stocks in Activision (ATVI) and I do not own stocks in Electronics Arts (ERTS). My review will most likely be biased against EA due to personal gaming preferences.

Spore’s history

Spore is the upcoming flagship of EA with about 10 years of total cooking time and 4 years of hardcore development time, this is one of the bigger projects in the gaming industry. I fully expect to whore this franchise out till every little toddler has played it 10 times.

Written for financial evaluation

I am writing this review for a different reason than your normal game review. Whether or not I personally like the game does not matter (For the record, I don’t). The reason why I spent $50 to buy the game and review it, when so many other reviews have already been posted on the web, is so that I can personally assess the impact that this franchise might have on EA’s stock price. I am what people call a hardcore gamer and this game is made for the casual gaming crowd. Please take that into account when reading the rest of the review.

Will it make money?

My short answer is: No. Not as much as Starcraft 2 will make. Its publicity, did reach a lot of people due to its infamous delays and the promise of several games in one. Its marketing pitch has always appealed to the hardcore gaming crowd and as such, have always been shown within the hardcore gaming crowd. Which is the only reason why I am even aware of this game. This is why I doubt the game will see much sales. .. Because they pitched at the wrong crowd.

Reaction from hardcore gamers

I am probably the best basis to use to gauge hardcore gamer’s reactions and I can sum it up in a few simple sentences. It is a dumbed down repetitive boring game with herculean DRM that I don’t agree with. It almost felt as if the VP of marketing interfered with the game development last year and told everyone that it’ll be for the casual gamer’s market instead.

The money model

Activision Blizzard is probably the best model to use as an example of how to make money in the gaming industry. Piracy is unavoidable, which makes the traditional model of selling CDs a money loser. Since spore has no subscription fee and no specialty hardware that comes with it, it WILL be pirated. The 3 install DRM placed on the cd will limit resale value of the cd itself and is supposed to bring in more money from more cd purchases. They did not expect how pissed off the consumers were, to the point that people are returning their purchases.

Casual gamers?

Casual gamers reactions are the bigges factor here. To evaluate this, I took a step back and reviewed why casual gaming exploded in the recent years. I didn’t have to look far, all I had to do was look at Nintendo. What did they do to make gaming mainstream? What are the important factors involved in Wii and DS?

Yes, it was the type of physical interactions brought on by these platforms which made casual gaming explode. If you take a step back and look at Spore on a PC with the traditional mouse and keyboard, you will see the problem that I see.

Conclusion

Spore will not turn the ship around for EA and I believe they noticed the problem as well since they announced a version of Spore for Wii. Once those come out, we might be able to see a turn around. Until then, EA is still missing a successful flagship product that doesn’t give them a net negative money flow.

I quit coffee more than a year ago quitting coffee. The abstinance lasted for a whole year before I succumbed to the lure of European coffee while I was backpacking through Morocco. I gotta give them credit for the coffee that they drink though. It was both more intense and better tasting. I don’t feel like crap after drinking a cup and I don’t feel like I was addicted at all. It was just there, every morning as normal as waking up and brushing your teeth.

Today, I am officially back on coffee and I do not feel bad at all. I have tasted the addicted world and I have alos tasted what being clean means. I can judge the situation in order to decide whether or not I should drink coffee. I treat it like a stimpack for marines in Starcraft. An option to incrase your abilities at the cost of your health.

Headaches, twitching blood dry eyes and insomnia are all part of the side effect for me and because I understand that fact, I don’t use it unless it’s necessary. I always make sure that I am not on cofee for a long period of time (Like any drugs, effect wears off with body’s resistance buildup) while blocking a whole month afterwards to cleanse my system.

For now, it is needed, but I can feel that I am already at the limit with 1 week of constant consumption. Maybe I need to take a break from this secret project of mine and refocus. I am running around wearing myself out without any results showing.

One thing that I miss and forever wonder about is what it will be like to grow up having relatives. To be able to nurture your relationship with your favorite cousins and to seek help from your favorite uncle on topics you dare not reveal to your immediate family. I miss the annual get-together in celebration of the lunar new years. I miss the celebrations of major achievements between relatives of the same age, to be called uncle and looked up upon by my favorite niece. I was deprived of all that the moment I set foot on this land.

Early on, I realized that the only people I can rely on from now on are friends

By the time I earned enough money to be able to afford the plane ticket back home, a wall had already formed between us. The last time they saw me, I was a 10 year old naughty boy who chases the chicken around for fun. Now, I am a stranger in suit who showed up at their wedding dinner. We speak formally to each other because we recognize each other as someone we don’t know. My heart cried out in pain.

Fact of the matter is, once you immigrate to a new country you lose all the connections that you had built up and will forever be at a disadvantage when it comes to tapping into your network of people. There are less family gathering, less weddings to go to and generally less opportunities to get to know new people, or call up a relative in a particular field of interest that you know nothing of.

Not only are you missing these advantages, you are also doubly hindered by the fact that you are constantly reminded of it. It’s true that we complain about our family and they present a source of problems for some when they are unhealthy. The truth of the matter is, we often don’t know how useful they are until you are completely stripped of one. There are bad apples and good apples in any tree, but what’s more important is to have the connection and to learn from it. Just because a family member is a good apple doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good for growing up. They may pamper you for example and prevent you from learning how to deal with something.

So, what do I do? I turn my friends into my family of course. Someone once asked me what’s so important about that blood tie between family members. I remember thinking that there’s nothing special if only for the fact that we were put in a position to be forced to know each other and spend the major part of our lives together. Now I understand it better. It’s the connection in your brains that are formed based on the interactions you had together. In a more general way of speaking, someone you can trust that doesn’t intend you any harm. Someone you can trust to hide you for one day when you become a fugitive. That for me, is family.

Phew, spent two days of my long weekend completing this little code snippet. It’s a good exercise to get myself back up to par with university graduates. During my career, I’ve seen stuff that are more twisted than my mere char **. For now, I have reached my limits and I will just be content with the fact that I managed to de-reference a pointer that points to a dynamically allocated array which contains pointers to dynamically allocated structures.

Do I smell memory leak?

I took the picture down because apparently, google search still finds it. Oh well here’s the project file and source code if you really want to take a look: lmproject