Undead Astronauts

chinese preference for sons may have led to the bubble in the US. the theory is that boys’ families have to compete for marriagiable girls w/ high savings b/c of the girl shortage, and the high savings rate led the chinese gov’t to buy US treasury bills and depress interest rates in the US. i speculated years ago that chinese girls would necessarily become a highly valuable commidity. u can’t have a huge artificial shortage of something in demand w/o consequences, but i didn’t think about it leading to a US bubble. i did figure that chinese men would outsource the problem to poorer nations by marrying women of southeast asian origin.

another bubble may be close to popping. the cost of higher ed. has been rising far faster than inflation, but w/ the recession, many potential college students may head to community colleges instead of big name ivy schools. what’s in a name?

so the proposed solution is again to outsource the problem. prestigious colleges are thinking of propping their prices up by opening more spots to rich overseas applicants who don’t mind so much about paying inflated prices. yet.

Three of the undead astronaut team decided to make a grand excursion to the rave multimedia complex to watch the recently released Michael Bay epic ‘Transformers 2′, an elegant, comprehensive addendum to Bay’s earlier masterpiece  simply known as ‘Transformers’.  The work opened with a giant transformer wreaking havoc on the city of Shanghai.  I hope one day we will be able to do something similar, in the metaphoric sense at least.

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the ricci vs destefano ruling came out today 5-4 in favor of ricci. for those that haven’t heard, this case was about a firefighter promotion test. this test had been used in past years to promote the city’s firefighters, and there had been no problem b/c at least 1 of the members who passed the test has been black. as long as they had at least 1 black person pass, they could say the test didn’t have disparate impact, which is difficult to prove in court. but in 2003, only 2 minorities (hispanics) passed, even tho the racial averages were about the same as previous years. (more…)

late, yeah i know. but this video really reminded me of how much influence michael had, and that pop culture used to accept uplifting songs that challenged ppl to be better.

here are some tribute vids:
filipino prisoner tribute (filmed 10 hrs after news arrived @ prison)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK25cfzdTTg

jane liu cover of: you are not alone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRKf9K5Tyg8

far east movement, quest, wongfu: dance like mj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCtEvOdOZvg

there are a few moments in history that i just remember the feeling of and what i was doing. the challenger explosion, the berlin wall falling, the first moments of the first iraq war, 9/11. and now, maybe mj’s passing. his songs have been playing all weekend, and it’s just amazing how many of his songs are famous and how much he affected the pop culture of my youth. my dad was even talking about how he admired mj’s song & dance and tried to sing a line or two of billie jean to my utter horror. when my dad talks about pop culture affecting him, u know it’s gotta big.

here’s the 45 minute short version of the movie. the longer cut is coming out this winter after the evo tourney.
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So I havent posted in a while. The last few weeks have been very busy for me. I’m switching jobs, out of this Chinese law firm into a British risk management company. The nature of the new work seems very interesting, its call business intelligence and investigations. Essentially what that means is that they look into a company to see whether or not they are doing bad things. The bad things may include fraud, bribery, forgeries, falsifying documents, nepotisim, stealing company assests, etc. The clients the company would serve would usually be foriegn companies who wish to do business in China. They might not trust their Chinese business partners, or their suppliers, or even their own China branch managers and employees. The methods the company uses to investigate may include conducting interviews with relevant parties, doing audits on their documents, going through their emails, chat logs, other communications, visiting their facilities. Sometimes the client would be a country government who believes that the company has violated some kind of anti-corruption or anti-bribery law. The biggest example would be the US Foriegn Corruption Practice Act (FCPA). Last year the FCPA fined Siemens over 1 billion dollars. Apparently siemens had an elaborate system set up to bribe foriegn official. When they were discovered, Siemens cooperated to disclose all their actions, the discolsure along costed another 1.5 billion in attorney and consulting fees, all absrobed by Siemens. Apparently even though Siemens is a German company, the fact that their corruption scheme at one point funded some money in USD through a US bank, it was enough to give the US jurisdiction over the matter.  So basically a lot of international firms are now worried because its very easy to fall under the big umbrella of the FCPA. And as China is filled with corruption, the business has a lot of potential here.

That being said, I have been trying to negotiate the contract with the new place while keeping it a secret from my current firm. Sometimes it gets awkward because I always have to sneak out during the middle of the day to meet my headhunter or attend a meeting with managers from the risk management firm. But the final signing should be this Friday. And from there I will inform my current firm next week. That will be a giant mess as well.