Cycles

It is said that in everything, there exists a cycle. Like we humans belong to a life cycle of birth, growth, reproduction and ultimately death. It is said that a fruit fly has the shortest life cycle which spans only a week. While us humans have evolved to having a life cycle of about 70-80 years.

We humans also belong to a bigger ecological cycle where our very actions have incurred the wrath of Mother Nature, depleting ozone layers resulting in the phenomenon Global Warming which we are all familar with nowadays. You observe the very cold winters in Europe and Russia and the droughts all over the world. Even in just one continent of Australia, we see bush fires down south and floodings up north. I once read that a 4 degrees celcius rise in global temperatures will melt enough polar ice caps to raise the sea levels which will engulf Singapore.

I believe we all belong in this ecological cycle where there is a feedback loop and slowly but surely, planet Earth will heal itself. But at what severe consequences, given the fact how much of Earth we have already savaged and plundered? And will it be within my lifetime, I can only wait. We all heard about the great floods and ice age and watch them in the movies - 'The Day After Tomorrow' starring Dennis Quaid struck a chord with me as a possible doomsday scenario we might have coming.

I've recently went to the Vivocity National Geographic Store and have set my eyes on the Solio Chargers which look fabulous! And are quite a steal at about S$99 only, with all the handphone/gadget chargers there is on the market but the only problem, it has a limited life span on the batteries of only one year.



They fold into a nice compact mode when not in use.


Still deciding if I should spend my limited GST credits on them to reduce my carbon footprint, and charge my mobile and PSP from it.

As I usually love to digress and remain incoherent in my posts for this is not a GP essay but a personal blog. I return to my topic of being in a cycle.

We humans are also in a cycle where the last 10 years we have seen many of the brightest and elite students around the world scrambling to emulate the success of high paying successful Wall Street bankers, financiers, traders etc. The financial world has indeed welcomed the brain drain from many other industries.

20 years prior to the the brain drain, we saw a technology spurt where Bill Gates (Microsoft), Len Bosack (Cisco), William Hewlett and David Packard (HP), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Ross Freeman (Xilinx), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Morris Chang (TSMC) and more recently Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) create communication platforms, software enablers, knowledge/data transfers and exchange, chips and wafers which gave the masses handphones, laptops, gadgets which enable everyone access to knowledge on the internet, communication devices, satellite access maps to see the world. These engineers, school drop-outs did it for the love of creating value from photo/video sharing to VoIP calls which help the world become closer, bridge the gap of information access between countries.

While the recent spurt of greed in the financial world to offer questionable CDOs and loans which lead to the subprime crisis can only come from scumbags who are driven by monetary gains of millions of dollars of salaries and bonuses year after year based on potential future gains which never realised. Do we really need to pay so much to have these top brains before they can work and actually create value?

Akin to me walking into a bank and finding a relationship manager or a personal finance consultant, whom I have paid out fees to have them sell me funds, investment portfolios which might have tanked after a couple of years. Can I blame them? I paid money to someone to take care of it for me. If I had kept it in a biscuit tin at home, the money might have lost out to inflation, currency fluctuations, but at least I have only myself to blame. That being so, I guess I won't be mock for keeping them in biscuit tins, because it can't be as bad as the 30-40% losses Singapore's brightest and most brillant have lost in 8 months and so far demonstrated that buying biscuit tins instead of banks might have been the best investment move these days.

So will all banks around the world soon be nationalised? Will capping salaries at US$500k result in non-competitive, slack culture in the financial world? I guess there will be a cycle to regenerate the financial systems. I believe there will be good people willing to take the job despite the monetary rewards being limited. Have we forgotten the fact that some people do create things for the love of creating value. Perhaps we need to re-define what constitutes good - greed is obviously not the way to go.

With each meltdown or crisis, a new technology/industrial revolution will often begin - Agriculture, Motoring, Steel/Metals, Semiconductors, Dot-com era, Oil Production.

So which cycle will soon follow?

I hope it will be eco-green-bio-related, so that I won't see Mother Nature's wrath in Singapore during my lifetime as many others around the world have seen lately.


Lastly a cycle I hope will not be foregone in the next election - goes out to the greater mortals whom we have entrusted our forefathers' billions. They have painted a wonderful analogy that if we pay peanuts we get monkeys. Right now million dollar peanuts seems to still get monkeys racking up $100 billion losses, I am glad we did not really feed them peanuts, we might all end up moving to other countries being maids and foreign workers. Oh wait, maybe that's why we are now given the option to shift our aged to Malaysia. I hope a cycle will soon come to regenerate our political system. I believe there will be many good Sillyporeans out there who can do a better job than the self-absorbed monkeys we have currently in place and perhaps cost less!


A quote that I really love:

“I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.” - Socrates (Ancient Greek Philosopher, 470 BC-399 BC).