Sunday 6 October 2013

Utopias, Ethicology and Privately owned Nations

I've been very ill over the past few days with what is probably some kind of food poisoning. Fortunately enough I seem to be on the road to recovery just in time for my trip to Singapore on Tuesday. I'm not sure if it is at all related, but I seem to be in a very philosophical mood today.

First, I questioned my own priorities and goals in life, specifically the importance of a partner to my own happines after watching this Ted Talk:


Quite a good talk, worth a watch

In the end, my priorities remain unchanged. Then I watched a couple of other relatively interesting Ted Talks, but nothing really spiked my interest until I saw this one about IT projects in governments:

Not sure if it was good, It got me thinking about something and then I stopped paying attention


I actually only caught maybe 20% of it, because I got lost in my own train of thoughts throughout the rest of it. Before I proceed I also quickly want to list this Ted Talk that I recently saw about the way N.P.O.'s are handicapped:

Pretty interesting. If you're interested in business worth a watch. If you're interested in N.P.O.'s a must watch.

The talk about IT projects in governments basically talks about how some tech experts go and work for the government for 1 year and make some applications for the government that vastly outperform the projects the government does by themselves. This sounds very familiar to me, because my dad has done a lot of(and currently does) IT projects for the government and the stories I've heard about some of the people he's run into over the years sound pretty bad.
So I started to question why it is that the government sector performs worse than the business segment until I remembered the Ted Talk about N.P.O.'s. Just like N.P.O.'s, governments aren't as incentivized as corporations to produce great results, because the prospect of a big pot of gold at the end of the road just isn't there. There's a few more factors like (excluding politicians) it's a little harder to be recognized for your successes and it may not be as 'cool' as working in the business world, but money is most likely the biggest hurdle.

So what could we do to change this? Well the easiest solution would be to turn countries into corporations, privately owned. They're not thát different as they are, both are organizations that in many cases are trying to improve themselves and trying to become more effective and efficient.
There would be some issues, but I think many of them could be resolved by having much more liberal laws about deciding to migrate between countries. That way countries would have to stay competitive and treat their citizens well, provide good healthcare and such in order to keep their citizens and in order to keep receiving their tax money. Of course this would also mean countries would have to be run much more efficiently, because if it can offer lower taxes it will attract more citizens as is already the case with attracting businesses.
Obviously one small caveat is that you may have to put some restrictions on the maximum number of people in a country and it's interesting in and of itself whether you could implement a system to allow you to select whom you allow into your country or that it is too sensitive to racism and cannot be done or only up to a certain extent. Maybe I'll write about this next time, because this and immigration laws are quite interesting subjects too.
The biggest reason of why I currently don't even waste a second of my time on politics is because it is nothing but a popularity contest. Not the smartest, best suited for the job, hardest working person wins the election and runs the country. No, the one who's the most popular in the eyes of the public, the most charismatic and the one with the best campaign(in other words richest, best connections etc.) wins the election and runs the country. I could go on about the flaws of democracy for a while, but I don't have an easy to implement better solution as of right now, it definitely has it's upsides too and I want to get back to my main thoughts, so I'll stop talking about democracy's flaws.

Other advantages of the privately owned nations would be the fact that certain more wealthy countries could buy and invest in poorer countries and 'renovate' them and turn them 'profitable'. This may be a quicker way to raise some of the third world countries into the second and eventually first world. Of course I'm skipping over a ton of details here, but if I covered every little detail this blogpost would turn into a book.
Furthermore financial institutions would become less powerful. Right now they hold a lot of power over countries who are dependant on their loans. The flipside of this coin is that countries would become immensely more powerful and they would be privately owned. It would sort of turn them into mafias, because they have armies to fight things out in case they can't talk things out, but aren't countries already sort of like mafias in that sense?

I guess what we would need is some sort of global Earthwide UN-like organization that governs all countries and sets up good ground rules that everybody can and should live by. But then again, how are the people chosen that make this organization? Some sort of democracy? Does this turn into a popularity contest again rather than people being chosen who will actually do a good job? What is doing a good job anyway? What are these rules supposed to do? Are the rules that the most people agree with, the same rules that will make the most people happy? In other words do people know what makes them happy? If not, how would we force rules upon people that will eventually make them happier? It's hard to answer all these questions...
Another question is: Is there a set of rules that will make everybody happy? Highly unlikely. Would we need a 2nd Earthwide-UN like organization with different rules catering to different people? Then some countries can register under that one and cater to the people who have different needs. There's undoubtedly a small subset of the population who would be the happiest in a society where things like rape and murder are perfectly legal. I guess in some sense we're wrong to force people like this to adapt to our rules and force them to live in a society that is not optimal for them.

The general concensus seems to be that the human race is evolving over time into a more civilized species and if we're to believe some movies, eventually we'll all unite under the banner of the human race, cooperate in relative peace and live in some sort of utopia with our only threats coming from other species from different planets. At the very least in the very distant future we'll all realize we should just get along and live in an utopia, right? Well... with the way it's going... quite possibly, because people who like rape and murder and 'don't get along' don't particularly thrive well and generally don't get to 'reproduce'. So survival of the fittest dictates eventually these genes will go extinct.
However, in the end we're all just chasing 'happiness' aren't we? And what makes our 'good' way of chasing happiness better than their 'bad' way of chasing their happiness? Of course a murderer chasing happiness by murdering people hinders the happiness of others who don't like a murder society and a non-murderer doesn't hinder other people's happiness in the same way, but there is no way for a murderer to currently opt into and live in his own perfect society.

I think this is where my little philosofical adventure is going to end for today. No superclear conclusions, besides the fact that there are PLENTY problems left in the world worth solving, but it would be pretty boring if there was nothing left to do, no?

I guess my final question to you is. Do you think there will come a day that humanity will have created a perfect self sustaining society with no problems left to solve where a baby can instantly retire the second he is born?
I think the chances aren't very high, but...


Tuesday 1 October 2013

Singapore and Macau Trip due to visa issues

Visa Issues


This week I got some not so great news. I will not get my investor visa before my 90-day tourist visa runs out on the 8th of October. Before we started the application process my lawyer mentioned to me the visa office was busier than usual and instead of ~4 weeks it'd probably take 6-7, but he said it would definitely be done before the 8th of October. However, it seems like they've been even busier than expected and it's still not here.
Considering I've already entered Japan 3 times this year, going to another country for 24 hours and coming back is not an option, because my lawyer thinks the chance of denial at the border is extremely high. So this leaves me with not much of a choice besides taking a vacation. My visa application was submitted on the 27th of July and they're currently working on an application that was submitted on the 2nd of July, so my lawyer believes I will get my visa somewhere in the middle of October. Fingers crossed.
I was already planning on going to Macau at the end of October, because of the Macau Poker series. This just means I have to leave Japan 1-2 weeks earlier than planned. I've decided to go visit my friend Vanessa in Singapore whom I haven't seen for about a year since she left London to go back to Singapore. Spending time with her and playing poker in Macau should be quite a lot of fun, but nonetheless I would've prefered staying in Japan. I have to miss an amazing lunch that was planned for the 17th at one of Tokyo's top restaurants. I also won't be able to see any of my friends and work on one of my projects is going to be quite hard, so I have to rely on my partner to take care of a lot of stuff for me. I guess I'll just have to work twice as hard when I get back to make up for it!
Overall unfortunate, but a good sign that I love life in Tokyo so much that I'm unhappy about a forced 3 week vacation and it should be a fun life experience seeing Singapore and playing poker in Macau!

Fully Furnished Apartment


As promised here's a video of my fully furnished apartment and my Home Cinema in action.


 

 

Fitness


Workout Program

Fitness has been going pretty well for the past ~5 weeks. I've gotten back on the 6days/wk program I used to do in London. It's really intense, but since I've done it twice already it's not that bad for me. The workouts usually take 100-120 minutes. I do abs every day, and the rest of my body parts I train 3x/week. Right now Days 1, 3 and 5 are Legs, Back and Biceps and Days 2, 4 and 6 are Chest, Shoulders, Triceps and also Cardio.
I definitely did not design this program myself. I'm pretty knowledgeable as far as fitness goes, but program design should be handled by a professional. I got mine from workoutbox.com. A fairly cheap online fitness website run by an entrepreneur/ex-personal trainer friend who really knows his stuff.
I'm already looking forward to Week 10, which is the start of the Breathing Squat phase. Basically for 8 weeks I'll be doing Breathing Squats which means only 1 set of Squats a day, but it is 1 set of 20 repitions with a weight you could normally only lift about 6-8 times. By breathing 3 times inbetween repitions, your legs sort of recover a little bit and you're able to perform more repititions. It's the single hardest physical thing I've ever done and I love it! Can't wait for weeks 10-17!

Diet

My diet too is courtesy of workoutbox.com. Based on a ton of information I entered, they estimate what my body needs on a day-to-day basis. Right now that means ~3300-3500kcal on workout days and about ~2300-2500 on non-workout days. About 20% of that comes from fat and I split the rest about 50/50 between carbs and protein, although I eat slightly more carbs than proteins.
In the morning before going to the gym I usually drink some milk, orange juice, iced green tea and multi-vitamins. After the gym I drink my big smoothie I posted about in my last blog. The rest of my meals are mostly brown rice and some sort of meat/fish with the ocassional smoothie, protein shake and salad.

Results

The results so far are not bad at all. I went up from about 70.5KG to 75KG in 5 weeks. I probably gained a little bit of fat too, but I definitely look much better and to be honest, I haven't been eating quite as well as I used to in London. I've eaten out more with friends, which is part of Japanese culture and lots of fun aswell.
Performance wise, I've gotten a lot stronger, but more importantly my cardio's finally getting up to a good level again. Over the summer I had a small issue with my knee and thus I didn't do any cardio for about 2-3 months. I had to start back at a pretty low level cardio wise, but I've improved tremendously over the past 5 weeks. I think I could run a 12 minute 2 mile again like I did about a year ago! I got pretty close to it the other day and I was only really doing H.I.T.(High Intensity Interval Training) nor was I that tired towards the end.
My best running performance to date was a 19:19 5KM christmas last year. I weighed only 70.5KG though and my cardio was in sick shape. I don't think I'm quite at that level yet, but I may try to do something cool again at some point. A sub 45:00 10KM could be cool, but that may be too easy. I'll think of something eventually.


Singapore & Macau


My next update will probably be from Singapore or Macau with a good old trip report and plenty pictures! If you have any tips/suggestions on things to do in either cities or if you're going to be there too in October, definitely hit me up!
Also feel free to post any fitness and non-fitness related questions in the comments box below!