Where extraordinary becomes eccentric

Giving away stuff isn’t always an expression of pure altruism, but who cares? Freakonomics ran a story a few weeks ago on charity, claiming that it’s the writing of the checks, rather than helping those in need, what makes us feel good about ourselves. I don’t understand why some people despise this- the good is done, regardless of what the initial intentions of the giver were.

Companies also give away stuff for free all the time; for example today, both Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s will be handing out a coffee and a sandwich to anyone who walks into their restaurants. That’s a whole lunch! Almost… Nevertheless, it’s important that such business model is becoming increasingly popular and giving away company’s products for free to gain customer’s loyalty will likely increase in future. Perhaps also the products will evolve from junk food to something better.

It must have been a very strong epiphany that I experienced this afternoon. Making my bed, cleaning my table, re-making my bed, washing the dishes - nothing of that prevented me from succumbing to the pushy voice inside my head that was urging me get back to my notes for maturita. So I did. Eight hours, two coffees, and a yogurt later I can say that I posses a knowledge of one quarter (or rather one third, I don’t consider our high school English equipollent to math, social sciences or literature) material that will be featured on my leaving exams. That’s a pretty good result, considering it’s only Wednesday the 14th and I won’t sit for the exams until the 27th. It gives me a whole lot of time to precisely review the remaining subjects as well. I didn’t expect that.

Of course, the studying didn’t always go smoothly. I am still serious with my declaration of war against the “writers about the countryside” whose lack of importance is equalized by their quantity. After doing a simple math — multiplying those two variables — I unfortunately came to a conclusion that the great stories of women struggling with numerous babies and men worried about poor harvests can’t escape my attention. Nevertheless, the guild escaped my warfare; even the youngest one has been dead for about 100 years.

The above mentioned group of writers is an excellent example of what I believe is one of the few hundreds of problems in the Czech school system. Biographies of these unoriginal novelists and descriptions of their interchangeable plots take our time and resources from learning about something truly great. While they are a sole subject of one entire maturita topic, Walt Whitman or J.D. Salinger must accept only either a negligible or no coverage. We can’t explore deeply (through discussions, for example) any books because we don’t have time. The syllabi briefly expose us to the titans, but then delude our passion for them by flooding us with the details of native writers with marginal importance, even within our borders. That’s wrong but as always, the administration is pretending to be a dead bug when one, even a faculty member, brings it up.

I have developed a strategy based on statistics and probability in accordance of which I adjust my preparation. According to this model I should spend the most of the revision time with the “writers about the countryside” and medieval theater, which might turn psychologically damaging, but must inevitably result in a top final mark. Then I will forget about them…

My friend complained to me a few weeks ago that her upcoming visit to the Czech Republic will ruin her budget. The complaints came in mid-February, when the dollar was in the middle of a free fall. The times of lavish spendings she remembered so vividly, the times when you’d get 23 Korunas for a dollar, were a history.

Thankfully, the friend was slightly exaggerating. If you come here for a few weeks, you won’t feel any substantial impact on your wallet, even if you stick solely with eating overpriced meals (that is $10+/lunch) and drinking excessive amounts of underpriced alcohol. Coming to Europe for a whole semester is another story; then you might consider cutting some expenses (Starbucks coffee?).

That seems to upset the American college students who are considering studying abroad. The unfavorable EUR/USD exchange rate is thus causing them to turn their backs to London and Paris and head to Africa instead. As today’s WSJ article says:

“We’re sending an unprecedented number of students on an arts program to Mali” in western Africa, says Eric Singer, Goucher’s associate dean of international studies.

I don’t get this. Perhaps I am too conservative, too focused on the post-graduation career options, but I can’t figure out why people want to go Mali and study its… art (I agree that “an unprecedented number” might mean 2, a shocking 100% increase of a usual situation where one student decides to travel to the Sahelian country, but still…)? My perception of money is apparently different from that of other students. I am willing to pay $35,000 worth of annual tuition (or its fraction - laud the inventor of scholarships!), but only there is a reasonable potential of a return on the investment. Regrettably, neither the current nor the potential future demand for commercial sharing (i.e. teaching) the newly acquired knowledge of Malian culture currently doesn’t justify the investment. Can anyone email me with an enlightening explanation of this — economically irrational — behavior?

But maybe after a year at Gettysburg I too will long for escaping the educational system and will leave for an adventure to Africa or Southeastern Asia, but right now I am puzzled.

Occasionally I can’t force myself to work. Not that I would have any better things to do, not that the opportunity costs of studying or working would be that high. I just can’t begin, the distractions are too tempting.

So I open my Firefox and type www.carmagazine.co.uk to see what’s new in the truly manly world of beautiful cars. And sometimes I stumble upon a jewel — like the new Ferrari California above — that glues me back to the screen or book pages. After all, the potential price tag of $300,000+ simply doesn’t condone laziness.

The Freakonomic’s author takes a look at the great idea that is currently the key marketing feature of Chrysler. If you buy their car, they’ll lock your gas price at $2.99 per gallon.

Calling for referendums on the matters of national security is among those things.

Earlier today I received a Facebook message from an unnamed individual who then tried to lure me to join a cause for ending the Star Wars, the cause for stopping the efforts to build an American radar station on our territory. The members of the cause are primarily non-Czechs who are stressing out the importance of adherence to democratic principles in the Czech Republic, in this case respecting the opinion of the majority. In its “manifest” filled with factual errors and demagogies, the group is also expressing solidarity to Mr Tamas who decided to hold a hunger strike in a shop window until the Czech government reverses its opinions on the radar base. Since this is highly unlikely, I wish Mr Tamas a joyful hospital stay in upcoming weeks.

From one point of view this initiative sort of makes sense. Really, if 70% of the population doesn’t agree on certain measures, they probably shouldn’t be taken. Unfortunately, those 70% (and more) of the Czech citizens are generally vulnerable to the loud omnipresent propaganda. This propaganda is spread by people who are brave enough to resist the facts and publicly congratulate Hezbollah for “its defeat of Israel”, all that on the website of Socialistic Solidarity, an extremist fraction proudly adopts Trotsky’s ideas.

Regrettably, a roughly same percentage of Czechs disagrees on the latest cost-cutting measure introduced in January in health care. If the marginal fee faced a public vote, it probably wouldn’t survive and would have to be abolished, despite its positive impacts on the budgets and productivity of doctors. The same fate would unsurprisingly await any changes to the tax system or sick pays (where the Czech Supreme Court has already spoken for the public and voted the changes unconstitutional). Certain things simply aren’t popular; nevertheless, they are necessary.

It would be an unprecedented move to have the people decide on national security. Contrary to the popular belief, the market isn’t always right, and in this area there is not a chance to correct mistakes of made in past. The opposition is again very strident, but the grounds for considering Iran, Syria or North Korea as potential threads are valid. In case of an attack, we would be crying for help. But we are not willing to make any efforts which would serve as a deterrence or prevention. Considering the help the U.S. have played in the past in formation and liberation of our country, it’s dolefully hypocritical that we’re refusing to have the radar base here.

Lately, even the fiercest opponents (except for the communists, naturally) on our political scene have reversed their stands and now, with hesitations, agree on having American military personnel and technologies on our territory, as long as they will later become a part of the anti-missile shield that should be built under the auspices of NATO (ergo the United States).

It’s shameful the ideas of the person who wants to remain anonymous is spreading (on behalf of the Non-Violence organization) get so much attention. While I respect everyone’s right to express his opinion, I fundamentally disagree with and despise Tamas’s ludicrous efforts that are aimed to delude the public into believing it’s omnipotent. The public should simply in no way have a binding say in the matters of national security.

NYT today published an Opinion back from 1990 that is based on observations of the columnist who researched the Burmese politics in the aftermath of the 1988 revolts led by students and monks. The core of the article deals with a hypothetical option of invading a country that is denying the basic human rights to its citizen, and its justification. By the 1990 perspective, just a simple demonstration of superpower’s military superiority could bring the regime to its fall, yet in some cases we ought to opt for more.

In reporting on the 1988 revolt, I came to understand that the smallest gesture of U.S. military support -perhaps nothing more than a couple of battleships off the Burmese coast and a few warplanes over its skies -could have won the day for the Burmese people. [...]

In such clear-cut cases, would military intervention on human rights grounds be morally justified? If it is, a second question must be posed: How could the principle of big-power intervention on behalf of human rights be established without a future American or Soviet government perverting it to prop up, as in the past, repressive dictatorships? Could some effective international control mechanism be worked out - a Helsinki Accord with teeth?

I would very much support such action, just as I do acknowledge the beneficial (and the detrimental too) outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which regrettably go unnoticed by the blinded general public. The regime in Burma, just as other tenuous military dictatorships, are alive only because of brutal handling of their citizens who alone can’t make a difference. The democratic countries should take advantage of the weakness and take them down to start the process of improving the human lives that is now in hiatus. While in the short term the situation might seem confusing, dangerous and even deteriorating, in the long term the freedoms, the value every country must inevitably achieve or fall, will be achieved more quickly.

The cold truth is that states rarely undertake military action unless their national interests are at stake; and the world has yet to reach a consensus about when, and under what circumstances, coercive interventions in the name of averting humanitarian disasters are permissible. As the response to the 2004 tsunami proved, the world’s capacity for mercy is limitless. But we still haven’t figured out when to give war a chance.

says Time when weighing possible options for delivering the humanitarian aid to the Burmese people.

Because my mother and my brother abandoned me for this weekend and left to visit my grandmother (and labor excessively around her cottage in the mountains), I have to prepare my own meals. Apart from the obvious problems I have to deal with that are related to making food, such as deciding what to make or when to sacrifice your limited time to do the cooking and subsequent cleaning, I found another conundrum I must address.

I am an economical person, especially when it comes to managing my energy (i.e. I am lazy), and thus selected the pre-cooked pasta with some sauce for my lunch. On the back, the package carried initially lucid, but on the second look puzzling, directions. In the second step they said that I should pour the entire content of the package to 0.5 liter of boiling water.

For few moments that rendered me visibly quizzical, because I didn’t know how much of cold water would later turn into 0.5 l of boiling water. Did the food companies take into consideration the basic principles of physics? When I was making a similar meal about a year ago, too much of the water vaporized and made the sauce more solid than liquid. This time I decided to add a little more (I know, not exactly a scientific terminology that would be appropriate in this case; I know I could do the calculations) than 0.5 I and hope the results would be more pleasing.

The outcome looked more like a soup rather than pasta with a cheese sauce. Once again I defeated by cooking.

The question therefore arises: would it be too hard for the food companies to adjust the amounts of potential food in the packages to fit the directions that would deal with exact amounts of cold water? “1) pour 0.5 liter of water into the pot 2) once the water starts boiling, add the content of the package and keep stirring it for 5 minutes” would certainly result into much better food at the end, at least for me.

Gordon Gekko, the main villain of the fabulous Oscar-winning movie Wall Street, mentored the young Charlie Sheen about the factors one should consider when making investments.

Technical analysis is one thing, but “the most valuable commodity I know of is information,” claimed Gekko. His protégé was under investigation of the SEC later in the movie, as he decided to invest based on illegal insider information so fresh that they hadn’t yet been announced to the public.

Well, fresh information certainly isn’t something the less popular articles on Wikipedia are full of. For example, the entry on Radvanice, the industrial district of a town 20 minutes away from where I live, provides facts about its inhabitants based on a 97 years old census, the time when it still was a part of Austria-Hungarian empire. Something is telling me the figures might have changed since then…