Five Four

Had it been spurred mainly by economic grievances, it would have little resonance in today’s China, where the standard of living in the cities is so much higher than it was then. If it had been moved by a desire for things American, satisfaction has in many ways been more than granted: fast food, Hollywood films, television quiz shows are everywhere, business principles are exercised more vigorously at all levels of administration than in the US itself. The reason the memory of 4 June still haunts officialdom is that it was about something that high-speed growth and giddy consumerism have not altered. For despite all the economic records it is setting, China today is not a sea of social calm.

Diary - Chaohua Wang

Steam-Driven Dreams: The Wondrously Whimsical World of Steampunk

Raining pretty hard these few days. A welcome respite in this region. Roommates and work group went to Schlitterbahn and San Antonio for the weekend, but I didn't want to go to the water park again.

This week, traveling abroad came up during work. Nigeria came up simply because it is so dangerous. Separated by distance and fascinated by colleagues who had been there, people talk about it with equal measures of relief and envy. This is a country that looses almost half of its oil income to corruption and theft. Daily, people try to tap into pipelines by blowing part of it up or drill holes in them. And when they get injured or killed, the oil company gets blamed.

One has gotten accustomed to thinking that the Middle East is not safe. But the most problematic country, Saudi Arabia, has kicked out every other foreign company a long time ago. Its state oil company, Saudi Aramco, dwarfs all the Majors. It single handedly controls all the oil in the kingdom. The kingdom, meanwhile, has become a buffer in the Middle East. It separates the Israel, Iraq, and Turkey hot zone from the relatively stable southern Arabian peninsula.

Everyone wants to go to Oman. The safest country in the middle east. It would not be an exaggeration to say it is safer than Houston. One can drive at any time to the beautiful interior, or enjoy the beaches. Dubai is mere hours away by plane...

Making of an EVE industrialist - part deux

The strip miner business is going smoothly. Since last month, I have been able to reduce waste on the laser manufacturing process by 12% by training up my production efficiency skill. A miner that use to have a 25% waste factor has been reduced to merely 13%, and sometimes 9% for parts that require the rarer, more expensive refined minerals. This means margins have increased. Before, it used to take 1.5 million ISKs to create a miner, now it takes 1.35 million ISKs; an 10% cost reduction on every unit I make.

Marketing and distribution

Manufacturing is the easiest part of this enterprise. It take no more than collecting the required materials in the appropriate amounts, a blueprint, and clicking on a button. Setup cost and running cost of production is negligible. Anyone can use a manufacturing spot on a space station, the availability of which is driven by supply and demand.

The real cost is in the time it takes to transport materials into the manufacturing station and selling the finished products. I use to manufacture in large bulks and sell them in bulks with a single price. However, In EVE, products have no brands, and therefore distribution and pricing are the only strategies. I discovered that I can make more money if I produce in fewer batches.

By producing in smaller batches, I can price my products according to the supply and demand at several different points in time as oppose to one point in time. Smaller batches are also easier to sell because the market lists the sellers from the least amount of a product on escrow to the most amount of a product on the market. I was able to achieve 80% sales within the first hour of putting my products in the market as oppose to days when placing them in bulks.

There are times, however, when an industrialist with a better researched blueprint flood the market with hundreds of units of strip miners at fire sale prices. No other prices come even close and the other products takes days, even weeks to sell. Eventually, when those cheap miners gets sold, there is a surprising lull in the market as the other manufacturers have basically gave it up for a few days. During this time, the rest of the products gets slowly cleared from market and a shortage occurs. I stumbled on to this lull one or two times and was able to price my miners at ridiculous prices and have them sold within 2 to 3 hours.

Lectures about Heaven - Thomas Laqueur

Stern’s ancestors stood at the pinnacle of the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated middle class, who regarded culture generally and Wissenschaft – science in the broadest, purest sense – as the core of an ethical and useful life, both private and public. All four of his great-grandfathers, both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held out the promise of a dispassionate, unideological, rational approach to the ills of the body, both social and individual. It was, in Max Weber’s sense, ‘a calling’, a secular equivalent to being chosen by God for his purposes. Germany’s Jews embraced this calling: at the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps 2 per cent of German doctors were Jews; by the early 20th century, at a time when Jews constituted something like 1 per cent of the population, they provided 16 per cent of all doctors. The proportion was far higher in big cities. Excluded from the higher ranks of the civil service and the military, medicine offered them entry into the life of the nation.

Forgiving Germany