Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The schedule of an educational consultant unaffiliated with a regular school can be an odd one. With students occupied with their classes until late afternoon on weekdays, the consultant is not in a position to speak to the same kids until their evening hours and weekends. The result is that the consultant's work becomes not so different from a barman: busy from the dinner hours late into the night, with no possibility of a free weekend. For someone like me who has always worked in corporate jobs where weekends and holidays are almost sacred for otherwise busy employees, the service industry work schedule is new.

China and the United States negotiated a temporary truce in their ongoing trade war, slashing the tariffs they had imposed on one another for 90 days and lifting stock markets worldwide in its aftermath. However, analysts from various news outlets, and surely, investment banks, continue to see uncertainties as the two sides left largely unsaid what will happen after those 90 days expire. Will the tariffs go up and send business and markets downhill once again, or will the vaulted idea of "continued negotiation mechanism" established during these talks help dial down the temperature permanently?

It is hard to keep marriage exciting sometimes. Having been together with my wife for more than three years now, we need to find some way to spice up our ways of conversation. And I do not mean that in a sexual manner. Just the day-to-day conversations about "how are you doing" and "what do you want for dinner" become a boring routine if it is done the same way, about the same content, and happen in the same context. To make the everyday a bit more exciting sometimes requires a bit of outside support, a tool to make the normal slightly more abnormal.

Less than a week ago, the European Union ruled that Malta's so-called golden passport scheme, through which the world's richest can invest a large sum in the country in exchange for citizenship, is illegal. The Eurocrats' objection is that Malta treats access to Europe as a "commercial transaction" through which those with money can simply enter and stay not just in the island country but anywhere in the bloc. On a continent that is seeing increased popular skepticism of foreign presence in recent years, perhaps it is not surprising that the move would be politically palatable.