No snoring?

Here's an interesting article from BBC News: Chinese military is banning snoring from the army. Hey... think about it, maybe this lets people get away from military service.

Bloggers' hint: housing market slowdown

Blogs are great - they offer an insider perspective on virtually anything. In an article on CNN Money today, it collected some bloggers' bearish point of view on the housing market. Once again, it proves the impact of blogging. Looking at Home building stats can give us a good sense of the market, but this information is delayed. Reading people's blog gives an advanced understanding of a situation, whether it is the housing market, corporate management, general sentiment on the stock market, or any other social/political viewpoints.

The Housing Market

In today's Lowell Sun, it talked about a report from Mass Assoiation of Realtors, stating that home sales in the Massachusetts have reached a 10-year low, and have fallen 21% in the period from Jan 2005 to Jan 2006. It takes no rocket scientists to figure out that the housing market is slowing down. For a bear like me, this is another reason to support my belief that a market correction is waiting to happen.

Ever since the burst of the tech bubble, the housing market has been fueling our economy. Just look at the performance of the Vanguard REITs Index Fund, the price has risen almost 100% in the last 5 years. A few years back, it was not uncommon to see a 30-40% annual return in these products.

Well... we have traded one bubble to another one. According to an article by the Economists, Goldman Sachs estimated that the total housing-equity withdrawal was at 7.4% of personal disposbale income in 2004. Yes, it means that people are spending money off from the house. As long as the housing market keeps growing, refinancing will continue to help people find new money, and hence new creative ways to spend the money to support the economy.

What happens if a major correction happens in the housing market? In the article by the Economists, it shows how even a soft landing in the housing market in Netherlands has caused a recession in 2003. Similar phenomenon happened in Britain and Australia. And of course, the Japanese market has suffered a 14-year decline in both the housing market and the economy as a whole.

Is America next?

Well, how can hedge against a housing market crash? Doing a little search today, I come across a product by Hedgestreet. Instead of traditional option trading, it offers something called a Hedgelet, where the owner receive $10 if the index is above the strike price at expiration, and $0 if the index is below the strike price at expiration. The good news is, one can buy these Hedgelets for 6 housing markets: Chicago, LA, Miami, NYC, San Diego, and San Francisco. There are also hedgelet for Crude Oil, Gasoline, Natural Gas, and even currency exchange such as EUR/USD. There are also more gambling feel hedgelet on CPI, mortage rates. They also offer future hedgelets, where the outcome is not binary.

Governement Intervention: the case for MMORPG

In August last year, China introduced a system to prevent gamers to play MMORPG for more than three consecutive hours. As a shareholder of Shanda, a Chinese gaming company in the gaming business, I know how much such policy hurts the profitability of the whole sector of industry.

There have already been numerous debates in the gaming community whether such policy is justifiable. Coming from a political view of the west, it seems that China is once again exercising its right to control its citizen. And the general sentiment is that a free country should not do such a thing.

Well, is exercising control a bad thing? Think about it, such policy hurts the Chinese economy. Does the government have no right to protect its citizen? We have all hurted that some Korean guy died after playing online games for 50 hours. The US and Canadian government do ban illegal drugs. In order for us to be fully consistent, either country should take on a non-efforcement policy like the Netherlands, or we should approve a government to design policy on behalf of its citizens.

Of course, this post is really in the arena of political views. Do a quick test here to see your political view (don't get fooled though, the site is run by libertarians). For a more comprehensive test, try political compass.

To personalized or not to personalized

Passing by the Google homepage today, I see a link to the personalized page. Personalized page is not a new idea. Excite was the first to introduce such concept as My Excite during the portalization of major search engine back in the pre-boom days. I have also been using services from My Yahoo, especially their stock portfolio ticker page, where to I put it in an iframe at my web turnpike.

Personalizing Google, howevever, is very different from personalizing Yahoo. I do pretty much all my search through Google. In my browsing behavior, the only other information gathering tools I use are Answers.com, Wikipedia, and a few other journal specific search tools. That means, if I personalize Google, the company can cross reference all my searching behavior. In a way, every time I get out to the cyber highway, I will be monitored.

Ok, take it one step back. Actually, if we install any Instant Messenging software like MSN, we are already potentially at risk of someone out there cross-referencing our identity with the source IP address. Microsoft tries to get everyone using their passport, which comes with the XP operating systems. That also allows Microsoft to keep track of almost everything we do.

Going back to Google, actually they already know more about me than I would like them to know. The Google Analytics service allows webmasters to have tools for tracking visitors. If you pay attention to many web sites nowadays, you see a brief moment where Google Analytics is run when you enter a site. This is true also for all my pages on the web. And guess what? I use my Gmail username for that account. Also, I have multiple Gmail accounts to store all my incoming and outgoing mails, no matter where I send it from. So if I personalized my google search page, not only will they know who send me an email, who I write to, what I publish on the web (by the way, blogspot owned by Google), but they will also know what I am looking for.

But then, why not personalized? Google already knows so much about me. Personalizing search page will let google study my searching behavior, and perhaps to customize search result for my benefit. Of course, they can also find better relevant ads to make me click on them often, which is their core business model. And imagine this, say one day, our clickstream will be declassified 100 years after our death, then future historians and anthropologists will have so much tools in their disposal to figure out what actually has been going on in our society.

Well... perhaps fundamentally I don't believe in privacy. During the tech boom times, some guy and his girlfriend started a web site call "We live in public" -- he installed web cams all over his home, and people can watch live video stream any time. Yes, the guy probably did it for self-glorification. But looking it another ways, if we don't see this phenomenon from an individualistic perspective, it is demanding us to find a new paradigm of society:

Ihe Internet is leading us to redefine the meaning of self. Our body functions together as one, and I have never heard that the liver is complaining that its privacy is infringed by the kidney. This can also be true if ease of information sharing is linking people closer, and self will be defined in terms of community.

Will Google be the Borg Queen? Apparently I have been assimulated.

Blogification of China

According to China Daily, 52% of white-collar workers in major cities in China now keep a blog. Granted, most of these blogs are on private issues, or complains about their works, and some blogs are just plain weird (just lookat the pictures that come with the article in the link); but I just can't stop to wonder how this is going to change the power dynamics in a country where most media has been controlled by the state in the past.

Check out Adopt a Blog, a project supporting free speech online in China. If there are enough supports, even the Great FireWall of China will have a hard time stopping the true blogification of the country.

Introducing Kremmydi World

Blogs are not only for random people to talk about their lives; blogs are not simply an invention that lets people to waste their time on the net; blogs are laying a foundation for a revolution -- a revolution that pulls down traditional large organizations that have monopolized the distribution of information, organizations that are purely revenue- or politically- driven.

I am not a good writer, but I will participate in the revolution.

Kremmydi World is created for one reason. It is a portal to the world that I care about. Except this introductory post, each post will consist of at least one link to something that has drawn my attention. I intend to make each post as educational as possible.