Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The founding and first president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, died today, two years after being toppled in a coup. Mugabe, who ruled over the country for a whole three decades from 1987, leaves behind a country plagued by economic mismanagement and squandered potential. Years of hyperinflation and shortage of basic services like power generation have turned what was once one of the wealthiest countries in Africa into one of the most problematic, with emigrants leaving in droves for South Africa just to make ends meet. Mugabe, without a doubt, should be blamed for the downward spiral that sank Zimbabwe into poverty.

On this second day after turning 31, I want to belatedly celebrate the beginning of the tenth year of keeping up with this blog. In hard numbers, what started a place to jot down my random thoughts straight out of college has gained 200,000 pageviews from 95,000 visitors. It really is not that much and much more can be done, I would admit, to attract more visitors and readers. Pictures to go along with the text would certainly be nice, and a consistent theme that keeps people coming back for more information would certainly be a great source for additional pageviews.

"I see you have done many different things in your 20s, but there is nothing further after Ph.D., so this particular job search will really be key for you," the recruiter was absolutely spot on when hearing about my desire to look for a long-term job at age 30. Just as much as going back to school for further studies hurt the prospects of landing a high-paying job afterward , years of jumping around different parts of the world doing what many think are odd jobs also make getting the next job only that much tougher. When the initial curiosity over an international resume ends, recruiters only have a bunch of questions left about motivation.

Nostalgia is a big marketing ploy in contemporary Japan. The nation's media spend lengths glorifying the heady days of the Showa era (lasting until 1989, marked by high economic growth, increasing materialism, and then the wealth of the stock market bubble), as a time of national optimism not seen today. Shops, restaurants, and even amusement parks play up the nostalgia factor with old-fashioned indoor decorations and menu items, attracting both the old seeking to revisit a slice of their youths and the youths seeking out an idealized version of the past.

With a dominance of recruitment agencies when it comes to people switching jobs mid-career, Japan"s labor market is already quite unique in the supposedly egalitarian, information-transparent Internet era. But, paradoxically, the dominance of professional recruiters also create a semblance of uniformity in the job market, by standardizing the image of what is considered a desirable employee. Without explicit intention to do so, decades of norms within the recruiter industry has led to more or less standardized codes on who is considered more desirable as employees in the minds of recruiters, often irrespective of employers' actual needs.

Collecting taxes can be a very expensive exercise for any country. For income and sales taxes, legions of investigators are needed to make sure that the sales and incomes that are being taxed are not being understated to depress the overall tax revenue. For some countries, further efforts are expended to make sure not too many people are being paid under the table and not too many things are sold without proper receipts. Inherence, investment, and real estate taxes can be even more tedious, as specialists are needed to value illiquid assets, whether they be real estate, antiques, or paintings, to get the fair amount of tax revenues.

The convenience store, a 24-hour retail operation that many Japanese (and foreign residents) depend on for the need for a late-night quick meal or emergency provisions of consumables like shampoo and toothpaste, is often a microcosm of the entire Japanese retail environment. Due to their limited space and relatively high prices for goods sold (compared to supermarkets that do not operate 24 hours a day), convenience stores must constantly adjust products on the shelf to reflect what the local consumers really need that they would pay a premium for those items at the oddest hours of the day.