Ahh, my good old blogger.com. Always there for me when im alone in the night, doing some homework, stuff that i rarely do, and feeling kind of desperate.

May I now take a brief moment to let off some steam.

Fml, fml, fml.

So everyone's telling me that me taking a Philo mod this sem was equivalent to suicide. But of course! I had to go to dictionary.com and Wikipedia several times for every few pages of readings - and even so for the simplest of all the others that I chose to use to write my term paper. Of course, the real problem comes from understanding all these text, which in itself feels to me like a coded form of English - the kind that makes the man on the street fail his comprehension test.

All these readings make me feel stupid, and yet this could be one justification for this course, as Socrates would put it: at least I know that I don't know. And as such, I am wiser than I used to be, when I didn't know that I don't know.

Now, I should stop dwelling over this...

...And why am I still here!

Well, the story goes like this. I have gathered 10 of my friends and shared with them a plan that I have for tonight, when its finally all quiet and dark, a plan where I'll need their help. They've done their prep and warm-ups and all - only to be disappointed by the fact that they hadn't had the action that they wanted. And that's because I got stuck on my term paper. So I brought all of them here for them to have some keyboard mashing action.

aoifdjs oidsaiofuewqopfd;dasuiocvnxzufdoiafsxz.,v qo

Well. An impressive display on the importance of teamwork, isn't it. When my 10 friends choose to break off from my leadership and go solo, the result is...nonsense. Literally.

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Well...I have a little naive vision of the world. A vision of the world! That sounds like an absurd thing to have for someone as stupid as i am, and at my age.

I'll get straight to the point and say that people should perhaps start striving for the greater good. Of the world. How ambitious and naive is that! Too much time spending alone on the train and bus to NUS has resulted in me thinking too much, perhaps for my own good: I could have done more constructive things instead. So let me spill out the thoughts and move on to better things when I'm done.

How do we even get there?

First, everyone has to really work as a team. Sounds easy, but its just incredibly, if not impossibly hard. Its too idealistic. How many locals could sincerely be welcoming of our Chinese Chinese (Chinese from China) counterparts studying in our schools? How many locals could sincerely accept foreign workers, and not blame them for stealing our jobs?

Honestly, if I had what I thought was a perfect job, and then I got sacked, justifiably, because a foreigner could do better than me, could I even feel that its alright, that its for the greater good? Of course not. On what grounds then, should I even be qualified to talk about all these, when reality strikes?

But if I could really do that, then change can happen overnight. Of course, attitudes don't change like that. Perhaps time can convince people to have greater acceptance of people from other nationalities and races. But before time can do its job, people should first be set in the correct direction.

I'd imagine myself looking at two different babies in a cradle. Think of them as having different nationalities, different races. I'd like to think that they both deserve to be equal, although they are not born that way. Its hard to imagine that one day, one of them might grow to develop negative feelings for the other. Something has to be wrong here. Imagine a peaceful little room of 50 newborn babies, and yet one day they'll grow to fight amongst each other. Surely, something messed up has happened in between.

I think it first strikes people that they fight each other simply because of survival. Sounds primal, but I think that's what going on here right now, that the locals aren't happy that our jobs are getting 'stolen' by foreign workers. What's going to happen to our greater good if we ever chase all the foreign workers out?

Of course, lets first leave the expats out of this. Im sure that people generally agree that foreign expats are beneficial to us. So - if we're going to lose the Chinese workers at our restaurants/coffee shops, locals are going to fill the vacancy. Which would then drive up the costs, since locals are much more relatively expensive to hire, assuming locals and foreigners are of equal productivity. And higher costs means higher prices! Sounds bad for people with shallow pockets. All these are intuitive to the layman - but there's perhaps a deeper problem: when we fall into recession, demand for goods falls, firms that used to survive and made small profits are now faced with tough choices: cut costs, raise prices or shut down the business. We should be thanking the foreign workers for keeping at least some of the local businesses alive by supplying relatively cheap labour and keeping prices down.

Recently I also thought of another issue regarding our workforce. In the restaurant, Spruce, where I work part-time, there are plenty of foreigners. The stewards, the ones who wash the plates and cutlery, are all foreigners of different races, working on rotated shifts. I feel that the local labour supply for stewards is zero. Because there's too much manual labour for the elderly, and the young ones aren't going to willing to take on dishwashing as a career, whlist living in a first world society, and at the same time when asian notions of "face" dominates, even if employers are willing to fork out $1200 per month(which is, a very high price for a dishwasher) for a full time local, the labour supply could still be close to zero. So what about that? Without foreign workers, restaurants might just resort to disposable plates and cutlery. Or, in the case of Spruce, they'll make me wash the plates, quoting the idea of "for the greater good" as I proposed. And give me $3/hr for that, "for the greater good".

Besides the "babies in the cradle" thought, I have also thought of an alien's perspective of the Earthlings. Imagining I was an alien, who has come from another faraway planet where fairness and equality is a social norm in a global society, where everyone works for the greater good. And I study the Earthlings, seemingly selfish in their own ways, struggling to maximise their individual benefits, and not progressing quickly enough as a race as a whole, the human race. When I return to my homeland, what kind of report would I write?...

"...I have extensively studied the human race and concluded that they are an obsessed race. The males are generally obsessed with soccer and the females, Louis Vuitton. They are collectively obsessed with their personal greed, lacking 'racework', and moving in the wrong direction. It is by no doubt that the humans are an inferior race as compared to us..."

In a way, I am raising questions about capitalism, but its hard to undo all the things I've ever learnt from scratch, that perhaps it is only the private ownership of the means of production that works in economies, and allows the best allocation of resources when firms are strictly profit driven and not controlled centrally by the government, although the latter sheds some possibility of a 'racework' global economy.

So capitalism prevails. The next step to fostering greater 'racework', after having more acceptance towards people of other races and nationalities, is to do more to help the poor.

Adam Smith has surely been a genius to have coined the metaphor of an invisible hand: that resources are allocated by the forces of self-interest. But yet, I would tend to think that our morals have to work with our self-interest in determining the allocation of resources. I once watched a TED talk where it was mentioned that more money is being put to hair growth in America then on fighting malaria in African nations. Its easy to understand: self-interested individuals supply the demand of hair growth products to affluent middle-aged high income males and make profits from that trade. But the resources could be better spent saving lives.

I think that helping the poor, or the so-called "bottom billion", is important because we could do much more to help them survive and receive education. The world could surely use a billion educated people in every single field: to solve the mysteries of quantum sciences, to solve the world's energy and environmental issues, and perhaps 0.000001% of them, which turns out to be 10 of them, will become influential philosophers that will provide new insight on epistemology, realism, and revolutionise Western philosophy. And perhaps also write in simpler English that I could understand.

Oh well. Just don't forget to do your part when you've got the money, ZW.