Regression toward the mean and cruel

In the marketplace of ideas, competition creates virtue.

Some people here at the business school have no maturity to participate in an open academic environment. Their grades might have gotten them here, but grades alone shouldn't keep them here. Trying to silence dissent and claim sole credit for teamwork is not only petty, but worst of all - against the spirit of the marketplace of ideas. The best part is that they end all their speech with a quote about how great a leader they are. How they can afford to live with that attitude and intellectual dishonesty just baffles me.

50 BS Jobs

Stanley Bing

Necons in the Treasury

In Gold Digging, China Matters writes:

"Glaser injudiciously escalated the confrontation by promising further investigation of mom-and-pop banks in Macau, possibly an indictment of BDA’s directors for being knowing conspirators (something that was bruited about in the Macau press) and, most unwisely, threatened to make it known that Treasury considered Bank of China Macau to be implicated in the North Korean money laundering web.

This kind of threat against the reputation and viability of Bank of China Macau is the best explanation I can come up with for China’s remarkably harsh and pointed subsequent summons to Treasury...

If the sanctions against BDA were removed explicitly to facilitate the Six Party Agreement, then the legitimacy of Patriot Act Section 311 investigations—and their intimidating aura of implacable, inexorable malice—would be lost.

And Daniel Glaser and his boss, Stuart Levey, would look like jerks who had been using the pretext of supposed U.S. law enforcement obligations to promote a secret, unilateral, destabilizing North Korea policy under false pretenses...

Given the general contempt for North Korea and the credulity and sloppiness of most Western reporting on this subject, the only reason that we know or care that the Treasury Department is out to screw the North Koreans no matter what is the embarrassment and chaos its intransigence has brought to American diplomacy."

Ignorance Collides With Political Naïveté, and the Olympics become the Sandbox for the Promulgation of the Yellow Peril

"One possibility that activists are weighing: trying to get Olympic athletes to carry a replica of the Olympic torch from Darfur to the Chinese border."

Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields - New York Times

Perhaps Steven Spielberg should read The Twisted Triangle: America, China, and Sudan and redirects his letter to the Bush administration.

The Good Tinker

Just watched The Good Shepherd. It reminded me of Smiley's People.

It seems the people who prefer discretion are the ones end up leaving their mark in the world.

April Fools from the Chinese media

Better than anything you read in the U.S.

some examples are: PhD holders are exempt from the one child policy, China would return to Daylight Savings Time, the Qianmen Tower had been sold off, Jinan had installed pipes for beer distribution, and counterfeit goods could be legally purchased with counterfeit money

and of course there is the other stuff about problems of higher education in China

Accountants, the soldiers of modernity

There is a Chinese saying, "Don't use good steel to make nails; don't use good people to make soldiers." We hear that from our parents, we hear that from our peers. If there is a profession that suffers the same level of under appreciation, it would be the accountant.

I suspect the hierarchy of the prestige ladder for Chinese people all over the world looks something like this:

1. Doctor (U.S. ones, of course)
2. Lawyer
3. Engineer (hard sciences)
4. Scientist
5. Entrepreneur (in China)
6. Engineer (software)
7. Accountant

For Chinese expats in the U.S.:

1. Doctor
2. Investment banker
3. Lawyer
4. Engineer (hard sciences)
5. Engineer (software)
6. Scientist (professor)
7. Entrepreneur
8. Accountant

The scientist is less desired by the Chinese community in the U.S. because they are so badly compensated. You spend your whole life to get a PhD and then end up getting paid $50,000 a year doing research in a lab.

The entrepreneur is lower on the ladder because the Chinese community here is conservative. Chinese parents prefer their kids to get jobs in big MNCs for job safety and also bragging rights "Oh yeah? my son works in the #3 Fortune Global 500 company!"

But, those who become scientists and entrepreneurs are true idealists, admired for their technical mastery and daring visions. So that leads me to the last on the ladder, the accountant.

Let me clarify the previous Chinese saying, one would not "willingly" use good steel for nails, nor "willingly" use good people to make soldiers. So, in this day and age, who would "willingly" become an accountant?

The idealist? Sure, young Chinese people dreammmm of becoming a number cruncher sitting in front of a general ledger.

The materialistic? I could start as an analyst in an investment bank for $100,000 a year, or I could be an accountant, working the same hours, and getting paid 50% less. The latter sounds like a deal!

To be sure, those who know a bit more about the accounting profession would say that Due Diligence and Compliance work approach the same level of respect that lawyers get, but doing anything meaningful in these work require you to be a Partner in any well respected accounting firm.

In short, there are very few people in the Chinese community who would willingly become accountants because the profession is perceived as equivalent of becoming a soldier. Indispensable? yes, like nails, but also commodity, expandable. Who would let their good sons and daughters become that?