On China and its rise

China wants a unipolar asia with itself as the leader. To this end it has facilitated a nuclear armed unstable country in the neighbourhood of ALL its major potential adversaries. N Korea to pin Japan,Pakistan to pin India(It also claims a Japanese island and an entire Indian state as its territory) and now a nuclear Iran to pin the US in the middle east.While it carries on a relentless mercantalist expansion of its economy for another decade.

To say nothing of its blatant supression of dissent and free speech including locking up of this years nobel laureate.

The real question is why many people in power in both US and EU seek to aid and facilitate this development when it is clearly not in the interests of our countries especially in the long term.

China shows no signs of a country that wants to emerge peacefully.

How RIGHT we are

... in the income inequality sense..

5% GDP - 2nd quarter of 2010 - Slovakia’s economy has best GDP growth among all countries in the European Union

In the second quarter of 2010 Slovakia’s economy is posted the best GDP growth among all countries in the European Union.


The growth is spiking but it is not yet the stellar numbers achieved in the past given the international situation. Still Slovak growth looks set to remain strong for the rest of the year. Germany energising economy is a very big trade partner for Slovak business, and it certainly helped to generate the nearly 5-percent pro rata jump in Slovakia’s GDP.


In the second quarter, the country’s GDP grew by 4.6 percent year-on-year, following just slightly stronger growth of 4.8 percent in the first quarter, according to a flash estimate released by Slovakia’s Statistics Office on August 13. Total GDP in the second quarter reached €16.340 billion.


“The ongoing strength of the growth in the second quarter real GDP in Slovakia was, overall, more of a positive surprise,” Vladimír Vaňo, chief analyst with Volksbank.

In the first half of 2010, Slovak exports increased on average by 20.7 percent year-on-year, accounting for a similarly stellar recovery in Slovakia’s annual industrial production by an average of 22 percent in the first six months, Vaňo noted.

“Compared with expectations of other market watchers of around 4 percent year-on-year and our estimate of 4.3 percent, the year-on-year growth of GDP was faster than expected,” Martin Lenko, senior analyst with VÚB Banka, said.


Though the detailed structure of the growth in Slovakia’s GDP is not fully known yet, Lenko said that household consumption in Slovakia probably recorded only a moderate increase in the second quarter, similar to its performance in the first quarter, due to the country’s still high unemployment rate (mostly in the east of the country) which is falling only very slowly.

“Slovak quarterly expansion of 1.2 percent quarter-on-quarter runs ahead of results of similarly open economies of the Czech Republic or Hungary,” Vaňo said. “However, the overall eurozone economy, a destination for roughly half of Slovak exports, recorded a quarterly real growth of 1.0 percent in the second quarter. In other words, recovery of the export markets alone does not suffice in explaining the resilience of the Slovak economy.”


According to Vaňo, gauging from these comparisons as well as from the strength of the recovery in industrial production in the first half-year together point to Slovakia continuing to reap the benefits of euro introduction via a more resilient economic recovery. He believes this is explained by a competitive edge brought to Slovak exporters by the euro through lower interest rates but more importantly because of exchange rate stability and significant savings in the administrative costs of foreign trade.


“The faster than expected growth of GDP in Slovakia, and also in Germany, in the first half of the year is forcing us to revise the estimate of annual growth of GDP in 2010,” Lenko said. “We estimate that growth in real GDP will reach an average of 4.2 percent year-on-year in 2010 as opposed to our original estimate of 3 percent.”

The rosier growth numbers for Slovakia’s GDP have not yet been reflected in significant job growth in the country’s labour market.

book recommendation: Bright-sided How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

This is a great book about the moronic underpinnings of motivational speaking


Bright-sided
How the Relentless Promotion of Positive
Thinking Has Undermined America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

A sharp-witted knockdown of America’s love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism

Americans are a “positive” people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.

In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to “prosper” you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of “positive psychology” and the “science of happiness.” Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis.

With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

World's 3rd Largest LCD Maker picks Slovakia as its manufacturing centre in EU

BRATISLAVA, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Taiwan's AU Optronics Corp (2409.TW), the world's No.3 LCD maker, will invest around 191 million euros ($287.9 million) in Slovakia to build an LCD assembly plant, a government source said on Wednesday.

The project, the biggest foreign direct investment project since the country joined the euro zone in January, is expected to create some 1,800 direct jobs.

The economy ministry said it would hold a press conference later in the day on an unspecified foreign investment project. ($1=.6635 Euro)


General information on the Slovak Republic

Geographical location: Central Europe
Area: 49 035 km2
Population: 5 379 455
Borders:

• Hungary
• Poland
• Austria
• the Czech Republic
• Ukraine

Religions:

• Catholic Church - 68.9%
• Evangelical Church - 6.9%
• No faith - 13.0%
• Others - 11.2%

Minority groups:

• Slovak nationality - 85.5%
• Hungarian - 9.7%
• Roma - 1.7%
• Czech - 0.8%
• Others - 2.0%

Time zone: GMT + 1 hour
Currency: Euro (EUR)
Parliamentary system: republic
Official language: Slovak
Election system: proportional representation
Election term: 4 years
Membership:

• OSN
• OECD
• WTO
• Visegrad Group
• NATO
• EU

Administrative division of the Slovak Republic

The following are the self-governing regions, and their administrative centres:

• Bratislava region - Bratislava
• Trnava Region - Trnava
• Trencin Region - Trencin
• Nitra Region - Nitra
• Zilina Region - Zilina
• Banska Bystrica Region - Banska Bystrica
• Kosice Region - Kosice
• Presov Region - Presov

Workplace stress and suicide in europe

The financial crisis will touch all of us especially older workers with one
eye on retirement.

However while a LABOUR government is making very few noises about this big
adjustment in labour (in other words permanently less positions). France is
at least sounding concerned about its citizens..
Reading a title like the one below sounds alien in US & UK largely because
anglo governments tend to be dismissive of people in difficulties.
Certainly in this crisis most people losing their jobs are not lazy or bad
workers.. In fact people that should be downsized like traders arranging
for CDOs or derivatives are not & these people have cost our generation our
pensions.

Overall it would help a lot if the richest 1% of each country made many
more sacrifices as a patriotic duty to deal with a huge spate of private
suffering.

Anyway have a read & see what you think.

Labour minister urges companies to prevent staff stress

French Labour Minister Xavier Darcos (photo) asked firms with more than
1,000 employees to lead talks with unions on reducing workplace stress. At
former state-owned monopoly France Telecom, 24 employees have committed
suicide in 18 months.
By News Wires (text)

REUTERS - French companies must prevent stress in the workplace to stem a
wave of suicides, Labour Minister Xavier Darcos said on Friday.
At France Telecom, Europe's third-biggest telecoms firm and a former
state-owned monopoly, 24 employees have committed suicide since the start
of 2008, and others have attempted to kill themselves. An employee of car
maker Renault committed suicide on Wednesday.
"We have long underestimated psychological risks, as it is easier to spot
someone falling into a blast furnace than someone who is suffering," Darcos
told a council on work conditions. "And yet (psychological risks) are real,
as the situation ... at France Telecom has shown in a particularly tragic
way."
Darcos urged 2,500 French firms with more than 1,000 employees to conclude
talks with unions on reducing stress, which labour leaders say is the
reason for the spate of suicides, by Feb. 1 next year.

France Telecom has already begun negotiations which are based on a 2008
agreement with unions.
The government, which is France Telecom's biggest shareholder with 27
percent stake, has been closely involved in trying to manage the fallout
from the suicides.
Unions blame restructuring and work pressure at France Telecom for the wave
of suicides, saying that some staff are being left behind in the firm's
transformation from a staid government agency to a private company with
profit targets and intense competition.
Darcos also called on small and medium-sized companies to put together
measures to provide information on psychological risks and spot problems
with support from workplace health services.
He also called on regional heads of firms in the process of restructuring
to take into account the psychological risks of the transition.
A dedicated advisory body will be created to advise firms and monitor those
which are slow to act.
A report will be made public on a dedicated website,
www.travailler-mieux.gouv.fr. France will put forward a second plan on
workplace health by the end of this year.

and ever relevant video oldie but goodie :)

On how one should start their career/life

American central banker on what he would recommend young people do to start their career and educate themselves.

Some politically incorrect truths about the times we live in, Globalisation, Europe, and the decline of voting.

Here is a small list of things you may or may not know about the times you live in:

1. Globalisation is essentially all about China and India entering the global economic system. These two are so big in terms of population that they are changing the game plan as we knew it.
2. Political and economic thinkers are on the whole positive about globalisation, but there are clear winners and losers in this process and if you are not extraordinarily talented or competitive you stand to lose from this transition.
3. The winners are likely to be urban chinese and indian enterpreneurs some of them educated in the west who exploit for the most part the unemployment and low living standards of their compatriots to rise up in living standards and consumption.
4. The losers are countries that have a democratically chosen bias to a more socialist direction in redistribution of income. Globalisation is stopping them from doing this redistribution and is one of the most undemocratic aspects of the change.
   
5. Stephen King, global head of research at HSBC puts it well: "Globalisation," he argues, "isn't just a story about a rising number of export markets for western producers. Rather, it's a story about massive waves of income distribution, from rich labour to poor labour.
6. Redistribution of income from workers in the west to workers in low-income countries has come about both through capital leaving high-cost sites in north America and western Europe for low-cost greenfield sites.
7. Cheap labour is coming in the other direction. The rise in immigration has helped to keep downward pressure on wages in the west.
   
8. Within western economies, labour's weak bargaining position has meant capital has been able to increase its share of the cake.
9. Crucially as the wealth migrates it creates a vacuum in tax revenues that force governments to cut entitlements to universal healthcare in europe, decent pensions etc.
10. Although i am not a green or a bleeding heart leftie I can see that the worst long term legacy of all this is pollution and environmental destruction. We all lose out of this one, and the changes will be unpredictable ones. It is not just climate change its all the other types of pollution as well. Capitalism of the chinese brand is not at all good for the environment.
11. Often education is offered as the panacea to cure the ill effects of globalisation. That is an illusion.
    

So is this some kind of commie sympathising rant, are we denying that there are positive results from globalisation? There is no doubt there are winners out of all of this:

1. The upside of globalisation is that it has led to lower prices for consumption and hence it has for many years raised your effective income in the west IF you buy shoddy goods imported from CHINDIA. This is why anything produced in your own country seems so expensive to you, in fact it is pretty much unaffordable.
   
2. "Consumers and workers are not one and the same thing: consumers include children, students, househusbands and wives, pensioners and the unemployed - none of these receives a wage.
   
3. Equally, consumers include owners of capital - shareholders - and those who receive income from their savings, whether through bank accounts or through ownership of bond portfolios." The likely outcome is that the wage earners of rich countries are going to have to pay via taxation the generous pensions of the old, the privatised education of the young, with the newly competitive (read low) wages that are allowed by the chinese and indian competition.
   
4. The financial crisis might be a bit of a new element in these calculations but overall it does not change the long term trend. Indeed the financial crisis seems to have been aggravated by the fact that a bewildered middle class in the rich world saw housing as the safe investment to help them resist this onslaught of deteriorating working conditions.
   
5. So far globalisation has benefited a small minority of upwardly mobile europeans and americans and their peers in China and India and their financial backers.
6. Multinationals have both been hurt and boosted by these changes, the more ruthless they have been about abandoning western europe and America the more they have been rewarded.

Conclusion

In other words it increasingly does not make sense to be an employee but it does make sense to move to a place in the world that is cheap and compete unfairly with your ex-compatriots who still have to pay the high taxes and meet the high standards of western europe. (In Bratislava i have met many people from western europe doing exactly that taking advantage of the 19% tax)

It's not difficult to see why politicians intoning about the challenges of globalisation are met with such cynicism. It's easy to be enthusiastic about globalisation if you are a winner, less easy if you're a loser. If you've just received a 2% pay rise when your chief executive has pocketed an increase 10 times as big; if your job has just been outsourced to India or China, or if your ability to negotiate a pay rise is limited by the arrival of cheap foreign labour, you're not necessarily going to buy the argument that it is illegitimate to defend your job and your living standards.

This is why there is indifference to electoral politics in europe. Most middle or lower income people feel that their living standards are collapsing and they start voting for the far right as a result. Who could blame them? No matter which mainstream political party you vote for you always end up getting more globalisation.

The destruction of the environment point is an important point as China and India have for the most part been organic polluters not industrial ones. This is changing rapidly as China in particular is inheriting all the pollution for goods destined for the west. In the end the environment is going to be the big loser out of all of this when you have half the world's population wanting to drive a shiny new polluting car.. after having lived totally organically for generations (because of poverty ofcourse). Crucially because India is a democracy largely only in name, and China is a dictatorship that is reprehensible to right-wingers only if their investments are not there, corrective action to deal with the destructions of the environment will not happen because the population is too poor to have such worries and because even if they did the dictatorial regime in China does not pay much attention to citizen feedback. Even if both India and China were to become concerned politically about the environment which is highly unlikely, they would focus only on pollution that affects people directly, e.g. not shut down polluting factory ran by a politically connected comrade, but simply move the people to another area that is not so polluted and so on...

There should be no surprise as to why the masses vote either for the far right or don't vote at all. The lazy consensus about the political and economic choices we have (i.e. more globalisation and you better get used to it buddy) is a self interested one. Mostly because the people leading politics in most territories have a personal investments that benefit from globalisation and they don't take actions that would harm their personal private pensions.

Personally i am not optimistic about the eventual outcome, the elites of the US and europe have elevated a repressive and unreformed communist regime to primary superpower status principally by trading with it and investing in its future. This creation is a strange combination of right wing american economics and stalinist politics, orwellian repression. In the near future we will have a dominant China taking over from the USA as the number one economic and military power. All this so the walmart americans can buy cheap mega fridges to fuel their obesity...

EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION. The policy makers past and present have dreamed the western world wet dream, we the currently rich world will educate our children to be fantastic entepreneurs and consultants who will mostly do white collar jobs and get paid huge salaries while the chinese and indians will keep buying our government debt because of the unsustainable pensions paid to our parents. Ok maybe we ll get some indian guy to fix our email but that is basically it.

Except the world does not work like that, both the chinese and the indians are perfectly capable to use new technology or do management (whatever that means these days -mostly being rich-) or become scientists. They produce increasingly brilliant engineers whereas the western world is producing media studies graduates with cocaine habits, a sense of entitlement and no understanding of rudimentary mathematics, and this is the kids coming out of the private schools.

History teaches us that it took Suez for Britain to realise that it was a bankrupt has been nation and no longer an imperium. Particularly the way that their rising ex-colony USA treated Great Britain then was an extremely rude awakening for the brits, almost 50 years later they are still trying to come to terms with it. Economically at least the UK looks set to reclaim the title of the sick man of europe. The crisis has left the UK in what can be seen as a 55 year old divorcee who went on a wild credit card binge for 30 years to artificially cheer up its gloom about its loss of status and who is now being denied further credit and faces bankruptcy (a mirror image of much of its citizenry).

History may be about to repeat with the USA playing the role of the UK in the near future.

Some also would say that it is preposterous to see the business and political elite of each country as traitors who sell their less astute compatriots down the river of globalisation.
Truly it can't be that all are so insensitive. The reality however is that the american dream is now a global one, and most people see life as a zero sum game, the jungle is becoming more and more the norm, and people feel alienated by this change and they are desperately trying to be on the winning side. It starts looking like we are returning to an era where established priviledge guarantees one the good life, a return to a kind of aristocracy of money. If that is true there is no end to the de-democratising process we have now entered into. When things will get bad enough, then fascism and revolution and war will be the next logical consequences.

work in flexible britain

For those neo-thatcherites
A friend was working in a very rich profitable company for 8 months, he was subjected to an 8month probationary period

this means:

1. no holiday,
   
2. no overtime pay,
   
3. no paternity maternity leave-not sure about this one but i think so-,
   
4. no compensation if fired
5. in practice no proper lunches (overpriced sandwich over computer)
   
6. as much as 50% of the salary was in the form of a discretionary bonus, i.e. they can withdraw it for no reason.

The guy put furious work, hardly had a life for 8 months pressured to work 12-13 hours a day and think about work problems at home at the rest of the time...

The day before his probationary period ended, he had a "review". His boss told him he was not getting the bonus (everyone in the firm got theirs). My friend said he thought this is unfair because they made him believe throughout that his bonus was secure, and the boss fired him on the spot. This is in a high finance firm and my friend is well educated, reasonable, and calm computer database expert.

Essentially the whole job was created in such a way to evade the pathetically weak employment laws in the UK give. Mislead the employee at the time of the interview about the job compensation. Outright crookery.. its not even because the employer had difficulties, they do it either for fun, racistically, or ideologically victimising others...

"Fair play..."
The bastards need to be taxed out of their wits... flexible workforce, yes very flexible workforce, very inflexibly greedy bastardly employers.

There are no unions in IT btw...