Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

There has a lot of attention on Japan holding Chinese fishermen and Japan selling Yen to devalue it against USD, but everyone thought the two news are completely unrelated to each other...until now. There has been new reports (more like rumors) saying that the Chinese are beginning to throw its massive 2.5 trillion USD foreign reserves into buying Japanese government bonds, in such a scale that the CCP is actually selling off many of its USD assets to make the purchases. If the rumors can be proved correct, its potentially a huge financial assault on Japan amid political confrontation. The economics is this: when the Chinese sell off USD-denoted assets, the demand of USD decreases, causing its value to decrease. At the same time, buying Japanese government bonds requires the Chinese to first buy huge amounts of cash in yen (using USD or RMB), causing the demand and value of yen to increase (USD and RMB to devalue as they are put in the market in place of Yen). Together, the two mov...

Recently, a rich girl in Korea showing off her wealth and luxury goods on a local TV station got the whole country pissed off. When it turned out that the TV station told the (averaged middle class) girl to make up the whole thing to get higher rating for the show, criticism and financial punishment for the TV station was logically and swiftly called for. The fact that the TV station is capable of thinking up something like this and the success in attracting (mostly negative) attention to the said TV show goes to show the sensitivity normal people have regarding an outright display of social inequality. Of course, this kind of wealth display is not new or rare. Internet forums in China practically gets new pics of some rich boy or girls' personal "accessories" every single day, attracting fiery comments from netizens. The fact that these young boys and girls are from wealthy families and did not work for any of their wealth only increases the negative sentiments towar...

So it seems I have believed for a long time. The manual labor job that probably has one of the highest date rates, the coal miner is the ultimate blue-collar job. In China, thousands of them die every year, only to be replaced by thousands more who come from the countryside for a quick buck (and a quick death). The lack of regulation in the mining industry (not just coal) means that laws cannot protect the workers and can't be used to improve their conditions. Popular belief (not just here but also everywhere) think that no matter how "safe" laws make the mines, mining is a dangerous, boring job without any prospects for brighter future. But the ongoing media coverage on rescuing 30-some Chilean coal workers trapped underneath a collapsed mine tunnel for a few months shows that maybe to simply consider coal miners are hapless and unfortunate pawns of gigantic mining companies is becoming a thing of the past, at least in certain parts of the world. There seem to be da...