Throw away mentality for profits

Societies in the industrialised nations are currently fighting the effects of economic recession. Politicians accuse others, usually banks and other politicians of causing this mess.

It is yet a different topic, but the tendency of politicians to oversimplify things and only think as sustainable as a legislature period, surely is part of the problem.

The source of the problems may however be found in history, in the way our modern societies have defined how the economy should ideally be, believes the German philosopher Richard D. Precht. The two main opposing ideas are:

• have strong state control over economy to make sure people have good lives and the economy will be good (John Maynard Keynes)
• no state intervention in economy and everyone will be happy by wealth; economy regulates itself (Friedrich Hayek)

Currently it seems we are experiencing the latter. And one must really wonder if this is the right approach. Isn’t profit hunting actually exploiting social values?

More and more people believe that making profits is the one thing that our society needs, to ensure prosperity/happiness for everyone.

To raise profits, the industry has positioned itself in making people buy things they actually don’t need. This is accomplished by appealing to status thinking, a feeling that is deeply engrained in human nature, the desire to always have something newer and better than the neighbours. People buy new things and throw away old things which are still perfectly usable. Not only is there always new stuff, but the stuff I already have gets cheaper; it loses it’s worth. Things lose their worth.

It is disturbing enough that we can be manipulated so easily to accumulate stuff which has no real worth to us. If it had real worth to us, we would probably not throw it away.

It becomes even more disturbing, if this attitude of simply buying and throwing away things becomes normal behaviour in the interaction with people.
And it seems to me that it is already happening. People separate or divorce quickly rather than making every effort to make their relationship work.

Reporter: How did you manage to stay together for 65 years?
The woman’s answer: we were born in a time were broken things were fixed rather than thrown away.

If your bicycle has a puncture, by all means, fix it! You do not need to buy a new one.

If relationships with people we “care” about are so easily exchangeable as the stuff thrown at us by the industry, I seriously wonder where humanity is going.

Can making a profit really be the ultimate goal in life, no matter where this mind set takes our society? Shouldn’t we rather ensure that society is going into a good direction? Must prosperity and happiness of a society really be linked with profits? Does economy regulate itself?

The world wide economic cool down may inspire some doubts about Hayek’s views.

[1] Richard D. Precht – Wer bin ich? Und wenn ja, wieviele?, 2007
[2] Richard D. Precht – Die Kunst, kein Egoist zu sein, 2010
[3] wikipedia.org: John Maynard Keynes
[4] wikipedia.org: Friedrich Hayek

The snag on the Japanese Alien Card

Yesterday my contract for my iPhone with SoftBank ended. I wanted to switch to a basic mobile phone without internet flat rate, so I could combine this with an E Mobile or WiMax Internet contract more reasonably.

However, SoftBank refused to change my contract, stating that my remaining visa period is not long enough. It is still 2 years, 1 month and 11 days, though. Should that not be enough for a two year contract?

I have already made three mobile contracts in Japan, and I never had this problem before, even though my visa validity was

• less than 1 year with the first contract (au)
• indeed, almost three years with the second contract (SoftBank)
• but again only roughly one year with the third contract (SoftBank)

Why?

I can only theorise that when inputting the length of visa validity to the system, the SoftBank people use the most prominent date on the Alien Registration card, which is however not the visa validity, but the card validity. And the card is valid a lot longer than the visa.

My card expires by the end of 2014, which in 2008 looked as though I had a visa validity of 6 years. It would explain why I never had this problem before. This is interesting enough though, as the visa validity date is printed on the card as well, it is just less prominent.

Some people processing mobile phone contracts may know about this, and type in the correct date, while others may not and input the most prominent date. Or they know, but to fulfill their business targets, they simply choose the date furthest in the future. A combination of “did know”, “didn’t know” or “didn’t care” may explain what some foreigners believe to be random discrimination.

Now add to this that Japanese people have no alien card and may use their driver’s licence. The driver’s licence contains, naturally, no visa information. But to make a profit, some shop keepers decide to accept it for foreigners anyway, while others do not.

As far as the guidelines are concerned, I’m just wondering how much longer than the contract the visa validity should be. And, must it really be longer?!

Luckily, a max. visa period of 5 years is granted since 2012. Considering that you usually need to make two year contracts, a max. visa period of 3 years is kind of tight. In this sense, we foreigners should be happy that SoftBank and competitors do not stick to the guidelines (assuming that more than 2 years of visa validity is really required) so strictly at all times.

Let’ see what SoftBank has in store for me, if I don’t want to stick with my current overpriced iPhone contract for the next two years until my visa is extended the next time.

Update
In the end, it seems that if you do not have a date more than 26 months in the future somewhere on your Gaijin card, you are expected to pay for the phone upfront, instead of paying for the phone with the monthly bills.

26 months because:

• 24 months for the contract
• 1 month for the last payment
• 1 month because the SoftBank system does not work with daily precision, but monthly.

Fascinating how this little snag on the Gaijin card can lead to misunderstanding and frustration.
I just wonder whether the cops fall for the same thing when checking your visa validity.
I wouldn’t count on it though…

[1] Japan Times: Softbank’s policies on foreign customers hard to pin down

The (in)significant self in time

In the last post, we took a look at how insignificant our home on a cosmic scale is, our insignificance in space. In this post, let’s look at our insignificance in time.

An interesting way of looking at time, is to compress the history of the universe into one calendar year. The year begins with the big bang on the first second of January first. In May the galaxies form, on September 1st our Sun forms, the planets following soon after that.

The cosmic calendar (source: Wikipedia)

Only 21 cosmic days later, the first life on earth appears, and one month later oxygen started filling the atmosphere as life had developed photosynthesis. Since the big bang roughly 10 billion years have passed, and life on earth hasn’t even reached the level of vertebrae yet. As a matter of fact, the first multicellular life develops on December 5th, and dinosaurs rose around Christmas.

On December 30th, 65 million years ago, dinosaurs become extinct, having ruled the earth for roughly seven cosmic days.

The last day in December
The first humans, which used tools appeared on December 31st, at 22:24 o’clock and agriculture is developed at 23:59:47, the wheel is invented at 23:59:49.

The modern society as we know it, develops at 23:59:59.

Everything we humans have achieved since agriculture, such as writing, religion, higher societies, science, simply everything…
…has happened in the last minute of the last hour, of the last day in December on the cosmic scale.

Our modern achievements, such as medicine, telephones, television, aircraft, computers, spaceships and the Internet happened in the very last second of December 31st.

What are 80 years of average human life span compared to age of plants, the earth, and the universe?

Dinosaurs reigned the earth for 7 cosmic days, whereas we have been around only for several cosmic minutes, having culture and science only since this very second in the here and now.

Shouldn’t this make us more thoughtful about how we treat our home in this universe? Who do we think we are, giving in to greed, taking the right to exploit and plunder the natural world?
I think there is simply no excuse for rendering the earth inhabitable within the very minute we came to be, destroying life that has existed and evolved for several cosmic months.

Or maybe it is better if humans destroyed themselves, becoming an episode of one single insignificant second. The earth and life would quickly recover and continue to evolve in peace.

[1] wikipedia.org: Cosmic Calendar
[2] Youtube: Carl Sagan, Cosmos – A personal Voyage (Episode 2)

The (in)significant self

This year, I would like to start my blog with a thought that actually disturbed me.
It is about how significant or insignificant a person per se is.

The utter insignificance of the average person within a society,
the utter insignificance of a society on a global scale,
the utter insignificance of the world we know, on a cosmic scale.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea…
[The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy]

Douglas Adams

Let’s just image cosmic scale for a moment, starting in our solar system, so that we can better appreciate the insignificance of the self…

Size comparison in the solar system

Now, if we picture the Sun as an orange of about 8cm in diameter, the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be 2’300km away. It is a distance of 4,23 light years, so, the light needs more than four years to travel between our Sun and Proxima Centauri.

The fastest space craft mankind ever brought into space is the Voyager 1 probe. It is flying away from the Sun at a speed of 17km per second! And still, it would take Voyager about 74’000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun.

Now, that is only 4,23 light years, but our Milky Way is 100’000 light years from one end to the other, and the closest galaxy to the Milky Way, Andromeda, is 2,5 million light years away.

Finally, the size of the observable universe is about 13 billion light years. And that is only the light that has reached earth since the big bang. As the universe is expanding, scientists estimate that the universe is actually 98 billion light years across.

In this universe there are billions and billions of stars and planets…

Now, how significant can each and everybody consider themselves?

[1] Geraint Lewis – They might be giants: a mind-blowing sense of stellar scale
[2] Geraint Lewis – Long way to the chemist’s: a rough guide to distances in the universe
[3] Vadeker: Solar System
[4] wikipedia.org: Universe
[5] wikipedia.org: Voyager 1
[6] wikipedia.org: Proxima Centauri
[7] Youtube: Scale of Distance to Closest Stars
[8] Youtube: Intergalactic Scale
[9] Youtube: Carl Sagan, Cosmos – A personal Voyage (Episodes 1 – 13)

About judges and words

The other day I was reading the profile of a Japanese community polititian. Originally a lawyer, he is married to an ex judge (in Japanese moto saibankan, 元裁判官). The fact that the wife of this politician is no longer a judge was a bit of interest to me. Given that he himself is 36 years old, and assuming that his wife is surely not that much older, but is already an “ex” judge, is kind of surprising. The profile further revealed that they have two daughters. This may still be part of a Japanese tendency that women will completely quit even prestigious jobs such as judge when the first child comes. This is a thought I will pursue in a later post, the topic of this post is actually something else.

It also struck me as interesting how different the words for “judge” are in the languages English, Japanese and German.

The English word may be interpreted as someone who “judges”. In the US they judge in the course of the trial about the proceedings of the trial itself, and when the verdict is announced by the jury, judges the appropriate punishment if the verdict is “guilty”.

The Japanese word is composed of three chinese characters:
裁: judge, decision
判: judgement
官: bureaucrat
so roughly a bureacrat for judging and judgements. Though it does seem fairly close to the English meaning, it implies that the bureaucrat does judging and judgement, where the latter can be interpreted as the handing down of the verdict, which was actually true until 2009 where a lay jury system was introduced.

The German word for judge, “Richter” is derived from “recht, richtig”, fair, correct, so is someone who makes things to be “correct”. The subtle difference I see to English and Japanese is, that in the German language a judge does not “judge” (German, urteilen) but is actually the one who makes right what was not, thus can be interpreted as the executor of punishment. A bit disturbing…

Though I don’t think that Germans would intuitively interpret it this way, I find this small thought still interesting.

The power of expectations, and how they can be in your way

I would like to share a thought I had the other day. It is about the power our minds have, in particular with respect to expectations.

I was on a trip with two nights in a hotel. In the hotel I noticed that I did not have my contact lense case. I figured that I must have forgotten it at home, so I did not look for it too thoroughly and improvised somehow without it.
When I got home, I found out that my contact lense case was not where it always is.
Now I was forced to consider that I had it with me all the time and that I simply did not look in the right place. This turned out to be true, and had I done such a reasoning in the hotel I would have looked more thoroughly and not have needed to improvise.

This epsiode reminded me of the extreme power of the mind, in particular what happens if our expectations collide with reality. This effect is called “cognitive dissonance” in psychology and can cause mundane events like an engineer who does not find a contact lense case even though it is right underneath his nose, but also tragic accidents that cost people their lives, as in the event of the Singapore Airlines Flight 6 in October 2000 in Taipei where three highly experienced and overaverage pilots took off from a runway that was closed for construction, even though they received indications from their onboard sensors that they where in the wrong place. Though not the only cause, it was considered a contributing factor, that the crew did not expect to be where they were, thus ignored the information from the sensor and the accident took its turn of events.

Of course, it must not be of such insignificance as a misplaced contact lense case or so extreme as a plane crash, it can happen to all of us in our daily work. For example, we may neglect to change a part of the product even though the customer has requested the change, because the customer has never requested a change in that part of the system before. It may even seem absurd that something new is written in the specification document, and may be ignored. In the worst case nobody at your company notices, and when the customers tells you, the amount of necessary rework can be extensive.

The same effect is also responsible for ignoring good and well meant advice given to us if it clashes with the image we have of ourselves.

“If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.” ~M.Forbes

My lesson of the day is that one should be more careful with one’s expectations and frequently do a “should vs. is” comparison.

Beaujolais Nouveau in Japan

Le Beaujolais Primeur est arrivé en Japon! And as every year, the Huffington Post and the Japan Times report about it. In particular the Huffington post portraits the event in Japan as extraordinary by concentrating on the “wine bath” in the Yunessun spa in Hakone, where people litterally bath in Beaujolais.

Though this does seem extreme and a bit crazy, this is not the first time that American media have picked up the wine bath for their “Groundhog day” coverage; the Yunessun actually has their wine bath all year around, alongside with bathes like green tea, Japanese sake, chilli (!), charcoal and more. I’ve been there several times, it is really nice, when not too crowded.

That being said, I think places and events like the Yunessun are part of entertainment and distraction from the stress at work. Nonetheless, the Boujolais Nouveau import numbers (source) for 2011 are quite surprising. Of all countries importing Beaujolais, Japan is leading by far, three times more than number two, the US, which, due to a large population tends to be number one in such statistics. I have taken the numbers and compared the four major importers with amount, value and population. I also calculated the amount of litres per person, but I had no access to numbers that indicate how many people actually drink wine, i.e. excluding minors, etc. Still, the comparison is surprising.

While in France Beaujolais’s reputation has been deteriorating for years, especially because of the chemical accelerants added, Beaujolais is still extremely popular in Japan. Why is that so?

“This drink is most popular in Japan among women aged between 20 and their late 40s, but the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau creates a major media stir every year and we are seeing a broader consumer base this year”
(Kiyoshi Yokoyama, general manager of the corporate communications department of Mercian Corp., 2011)

A media stir, indeed. The marketing around Beaujolais seems to be the key factor for it’s world wide success. But why so overwhelmlingly more in Japan, than the other importers?

At 500-2500 Yen the bottle, Beaujolais is very cheap, yet still a french wine, which enjoys an excellent reputation and is not as afordable otherwise. It is communicated as good entry point to the wine world for people who usually do not drink wine often. To sell at even lower prices, 2011 saw the introduction of plastic bottles.

The first bottle world wide can be opened in Japan, which seems to add an extra kick to the Beaujolais ritual. And even though one may argue that Japanese people like rituals, ceremonies, and trends in general, this ritual is clearly induced and kept alive by radical marketing.

It even seems that the three Marketeers have already started to get new grounds in China, where, according to Lufthansa Cargo, the demand is “notebly high”.

Are people in Asia more susceptible to “media stirs”? Is it the crave for (crazy) events? Something totally different? What is yout take?