New Word
Ineptocracy (in-ept-oc-ra-cy) System of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
My dear Kannu
here is something that is an interesting read about how two adults take their young child to Disneyland. As you remember, we have been to Eurodisney twice, once with you and once with you and Diya. I have to admit that I loved both the visits, even though at the second one, we had to sit and watch ManUtd lose to Barcelona which took some of the shine off. It was fun and games, i really enjoyed the time with you kids and loved seeing how you kids enjoyed yourself.
Disneyland makes people happy and as the old quote goes, Walt Disney has been responsible for more of human happiness than all the religious leaders of the world combined. Which is true. Disney cartoons, the amusement parks, the movies, they make people happy. And that's a very good life aim to go for, be happy.
As you read this article, you will see that both the parents are dripping with cynicism. I suggest you be careful of this feeling, son. People who are cynical are basically miserable people. You will notice that their cynicism is soul destroying and screws up everything else.
Look at the parents below. Their little child is having oodles of fun, playing with Mickey Mouse and having fun with eating ice cream or going on the merry go round. What is the predominant feeling of the parents? They are busy worrying about economics, about racism, about demographics, about liberalism and so on and so forth. They see every interaction with suspicion, every cheery wave with doubt and every smile as a hidden mechanism to exhort money. So instead of enjoying with their child, instead of looking at mickey mouse with the same wide eyed amazement like their child does, or running through the fountain of water or imagining the castle as a real one and telling their little girl that she is a princess and you are an ogre, they are miserable characters.
Try not to be cynical, son. While there is something in the philosophical school of Cynicism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism), this cynicism is different, it involves going around assuming the worst in everything and not having fun and not being happy.
Be happy son, life is fun and good, being cynical and constantly being miserable is best left to others, at end of the day, you want to be happy in your life. Cynical people make a hell out of a heaven.
Anyway, be happy son.
Love
Baba
Attractions: U.s. Journal: Pinellas County, Florida Attractions : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1971/01/02/1971_01_02_052_TNY_CARDS_000299445?currentPage=all
The first thing I did at Walt Disney World was to take an oath not to make any smart-aleck remarks. A Disney public-relations man had told me that attitude was everything. So I placed my left hand on a seven-Adventure book of tickets to the Magic Kingdom and raised my right hand and promised that there would be no sarcasm on my lips or in my heart.
“And do you further swear or affirm,” I asked myself, “that you will not concoct any of those theories about how Disney World may reflect the escape fantasies of American Society or about how Disney World may be the symbol of the Final Plasticization of All Life, or any of that kind of thing?”
“I do,” I replied. “I certainly do. We’re just going to have a good time.”
I mention this ceremony in order to make it clear that I was committed to taking Disney World on its own terms even before my three-year-old daughter, Abigail, became a personal friend of Mickey Mouse—the two of them having become acquainted while posing together for a Paris-Match photographer and then, a day or two later, Abigail having been snatched by Mickey from a gaggle of children and taken on a private parade around the lobby of the Polynesian Village, one of the two resort hotels already built right on the grounds of the Vacation Kingdom of the World. My wife, who had not taken the oath, reacted to the picture-taking by expressing concern for whoever it was who had to earn his living by walking around inside a Mickey Mouse suit in eighty-five-degree weather making cute gestures.
“He’s a very nice mouse,” Abigail said when the posing was over.
We agreed that he seemed nice, but once Abigail had run ahead to investigate more of what she insists on calling Dizalee World, my wife was whispering about Mickey behind his back—pointing out that his face was a lot flatter than the faces of real mice, which can be taken as a corroboration of the flat-face explanation of Disney’s cartoon method. (“The human face is flattened, compared with most animals, and any species that resemble man in this way are at an advantage,” Ramona and Desmond Morris wrote in their book “Men and Pandas.” “Walt Disney has always made use of this fact when creating animal heroes. They are given exaggeratedly flattened faces, whereas the animal villains are given dramatically elongated snouts.”)
I knew, though, that she was still more concerned with who was inside Mickey than with how flat Mickey’s face was. All of the employees we had encountered at Disney World—the Lodging Hostesses, the desk clerks, the Serving Hostesses (my wife persisted in calling them waitresses), the newsstand cashiers, the street cleaners (I believe my wife wanted to call them Litter Hosts)—had been the kind of well-scrubbed, wholesome, eternally smiling young Americans whose reaction to being within fifty yards of any other human being is to shout a cheery hello and ask him if he’s having fun. Into the spirit of things from the start, I smiled whenever they smiled, and I said I was having lots of fun whenever I was asked. But my wife insisted on analyzing the hiring policy. She wanted to know, for instance, why an enterprise that had seven thousand new jobs available in central Florida hadn’t tried to retrain some underemployed black migrant workers instead of soaking up every clean-cut middle-class kid between Key West and Philadelphia. As she went on about how hot it must be inside a Mickey Mouse suit, I suddenly realized what she was thinking. Knowing that Disney would have to hire a certain percentage of blacks to avoid trouble, and being acquainted with the theory that too many black faces would spoil the fantasy of escape into the safe old days, she had figured out the logical place to put any black migrant worker who actually was hired: in the Mickey Mouse suit. My wife had probably been thinking that the Mickey Mouse who roamed the Magic Kingdom, waving and bowing and shaking hands, always remained silent not because speech would have broken the mood (the supposition of most of the people who feel compelled to analyze) or because mice can’t talk (my belief, under oath) but because visitors to Disney World would have been shocked to discover that Mickey Mouse had a heavy Southern Negro accent. Attitude is everything.
A lot of the customers at Disney World seemed too attraction-wise to have the proper attitude for enjoying Disney World. On our first day, we went to see the Mickey Mouse Revue, which turned out to be Abigail’s second-favorite Adventure in the Magic Kingdom—partly, I suspect, because of her personal contact with the star. After we had watched an introductory film about the history of Mickey Mouse animation—my wife poking me all the while to remind me about the flatness of the faces—some doors on our right opened automatically and a voice with what I can only describe as a Kappa Kappa Gamma accent came over the public-address system instructing us to move into the main theatre for the revue. Walking parallel to the stage, we stopped at seats directly in the center, but then the voice came again, asking that everyone fill up the seats as far to the right as possible. A woman sitting next to us started to rise, but her husband put his hand on her arm and said, “Don’t move. It’s only a tape.” A few minutes later, as we were all enjoying the overture led by a magically mechanized Mickey Mouse, who looked almost as realistic as he had with an alleged migrant worker inside of him, someone behind us said, “I bet Disney’s got five hundred grand tied up in the technology of this one alone.” What kind of talk is that for the Magic Kingdom?From then on, I tried to keep Abigail away from strangers, afraid that one of them would try to persuade her that her favorite Adventure, It’s a Small World, was not nearly as impressive as the Hall of Presidents, since making automated figures that seem like dolls is not nearly as much of a technical triumph as making automated figures that seem like Presidents. (Abigail happens to prefer dolls to Presidents.) I tried to insulate Abigail from that kind of thinking—I avoided the temptation to refer to Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel as a merry-go-round, and I shouted “Hiya, Donald!” every time we got anywhere near Donald Duck—but my wife was a consistently non-magical influence. Although I had been able to assure her, after making inquiries, that the man in the Mickey Mouse suit was a white ex-jockey rather than a migrant worker whose growth had been stunted from too much bending in the fields, and that the people wandering the grounds inside the skins of hairier Disney characters were cooled by a form of dry-ice air-conditioning, she persisted in viewing Disney World as if it were an enterprise constructed by a corporation rather than the magically ordained Vacation Kingdom of the World. As the sun grew hotter every day, she suggested that a truly forward-looking firm would have thought of doming Orange County. She constantly pointed out that the cars of the futuristic monorail system that was available to whisk us from the Adventures of the Magic Kingdom back to the Polynesian Village hotel were not as modern as those in the shuttle trains of the new Tampa airport. When we were entertained by a fine banjo group during a twenty- or thirty-minute wait for the monorail train one day, she did not attempt to lead everyone in a sing-along—as I had seen a woman do in a similarly entertained line in front of the Country Bear Jamboree, my own favorite Adventure in the Magic Kingdom—but merely sighed occasionally and mumbled something about the wait for the downtown I.R.T. local. I said, “Nice of them to entertain us while we’re waiting to be whisked,” but it sounded lame.
She did not seem to react well to the ferocious friendliness of the young Disney World employees, particularly when it came in conjunction with the service problems that any tourist operation is bound to have in its first few weeks—problems complicated by the fact that the young people manning, say, the Polynesian Village seemed to owe their cheerfulness partly to not having had enough experience in hotel work to have been turned sullen.
“But attitude is everything,” I tried to explain to my wife one morning as we had breakfast at one of the restaurants on the old-fashioned Main Street of the Magic Kingdom. “For them and for us. The next time our Serving Hostess asks me if I’m having fun, I’m not just going to say yes—I’m going to say, ‘I sure am, Serving Hostess! It’s real great to be here in the Magic Kingdom!’ ”
My wife stared at her plate. “If one more of those cute little girls smiles at me and asks me if I’m having fun as she serves me cold eggs, I’m leaving,” she said.
My attitude was bound to be affected by that kind of talk. I began to find that when I was dealing with a Walt Disney World employee my cheerfulness varied inversely with his cheerfulness. When I asked a shining young thing outside the Mickey Mouse Revile about the wait inside and was told, with a smile, that the show was continuous—a statement that I knew from a previous visit was somewhere between an evasion and a falsehood—I found myself resenting the smile more than the misinformation. One afternoon, I spent a few hours trying to prevail upon somebody at the Polynesian Village to fix the television set in our room, and I found it more and more difficult to answer that I was having fun as a series of talks with relentlessly friendly young people at the front desk resulted in nobody showing up at our room except a man who said he had been sent to fix the air-conditioning. Returning from one of my negotiating sessions late in the afternoon, I had to admit to my wife that I did not trust myself to return to the front desk. In my final conversation with one of the smiling young clerks, I had caught myself as I was about to pound my fist on the desk and shout, “I demand to see a grownup!”
I had to guard my attitude while standing in line. If we were standing behind a few hundred people who wanted to see the same Adventure, I would try to brighten things up by commenting that it was thoughtful of Disney to provide strolling mariachi bands that were free of those occasional sour trumpet notes and drink-cadging episodes found among mariachi bands in places like Mexico, but secretly I wanted to be in a shorter line to another Adventure—any Adventure. I found myself thinking that if Walt Disney Productions really does take over the country or the world (a possibility my wife kept raising), the way it would solve, say, the welfare problem in New York would be to put a huge line in front of the welfare office and have no waiting at all at the office in which people were signed up as busboys—signed up by smiling young things who assured everyone that busboy jobs almost always lead to middle-management positions. “No theories,” I had to remind myself.
By our second day in Disney World—a Sunday—I had devised a scheme by which we might take Abigail on the Skyway to Tomorrowland, a kind of ski lift across the Magic Kingdom, without having to wait in the line that always seemed to stretch halfway through Fantasyland. The key to my scheme was for us to be at the Fantasyland section of the Magic Kingdom when it opened, at ten o’clock. I knew there were relatively few people actually staying on the grounds at Disney World, since the two resort hotels were still not ready for complete occupancy. Very few people from the outside world could arrive early, I figured, because they all had to drive some distance and then face what I had heard was at least an hour’s wait at the main gate. At exactly ten o’clock, we rushed through Cinderella’s Castle into Fantasyland and headed past Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel toward the entrance of the Skyway to Tomorrowland.
Abigail stopped walking. “I want to ride the merry-go-round,” she said.
“But we can always ride on Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel,” I said. “Now is the best time to go on the Skyway to Tomorrowland, because the Skyway to Tomorrowland is even more fun if you don’t have to stand in line for an hour before you get on it.”
“I love the merry-go-round,” Abigail said.
People were streaming past us. I could feel my entire scheme threatened. “Why aren’t these people in church?” I said to my wife. “What’s this country coming to?”
I turned to Abigail and tried to explain the problem. “Look, Abigail,” I said. “Here’s the plan. We ride the Skyway to Tomorrowland over to Tomorrowland. Then, while we’re in Tomorrowland, we ride the cars on the Grand Prix Raceway before those damned little boys have a chance to line up for eight blocks in front of it. Then we trot over to Adventureland and take the Jungle Cruise—unless it looks very uncrowded, in which case we pop into the Swiss Family Island Treehouse and then take the Jungle Cruise. That still may give us time to hit Peter Pan’s Flight back in Fantasyland if a lot of those people take their time coming up Main Street.”
I looked at Abigail. She was thinking it over. “Then we go on the merry-go-round,” she finally said.
“Exactly,” I said, proud that my daughter understood how a little scheming might be necessary even in the Magic Kingdom. As we hurried off toward the Skyway to Tomorrowland, I looked forward to a cheerful afternoon in the Magic Kingdom—the rest of them lined up at the Skyway or the Grand Prix or someplace while Abigail and I rode the merry-go-round, almost as carefree as we are when we ride the merry-go-round in Central Park and don’t have to worry about how long the lines in front of other Adventures are getting while we’re going round and round.
Early the following morning, I happened to be in the Magic Kingdom without Abigail or my wife. Business hours had been more effective than church in keeping the early-morning quiet, and it was possible to take a peaceful stroll down Main Street. Our no-line sweep the previous morning through what I had dreaded as the most crowded Adventures had been great for my attitude; as I walked toward Fantasyland, I answered a popcorn vender and a street sweeper and the driver of an old-fashioned car by saying I certainly was having a good time. I knew I would soon have to turn more analytical in order to defend Disney against any criticism my wife might have that morning after she and Abigail had been whisked over from the Polynesian Village.
“This reproduction of an old-fashioned Main Street is just a way to get people to buy things,” she would say.
“But that’s what an old-fashioned Main Street was,” I would reply. I stopped in front of the old-fashioned Emporium and wondered if I had enough time to stop in and buy Abigail a Mickey Mouse luggage tag.
“If they want to be so authentically American,” she would say, “why do they have frozen orange juice instead of fresh orange juice in the Florida Citrus Growers’ stand and ‘Indian crafts’ from Hong Kong instead of real Indian crafts at the Frontier Trading Post?”
“Because there’s a bigger profit margin on frozen orange juice and Hong Kong Indian crafts,” I would say. “And a bigger profit margin is authentically American.”
As I walked through Cinderella’s Castle into Fantasyland, it started to rain. I suddenly realized that I had an extraordinary opportunity. It was a rainy Monday morning, the relatively few people in the Magic Kingdom were seeking shelter, and I was only a couple of hundred yards from the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage, normally known as the Adventure with the most fantastic line in Fantasyland. There was bound to be practically no line at all. I would be able just to toss an E coupon from my seven-Adventure book at the attendant and walk right aboard. On the other hand, I had been on the Submarine Voyage at Disneyland, in California, and I remembered being so bored that halfway through the voyage I had considered asking the captain if I could possibly be shot to the surface. But could I pass up the opportunity to avoid a two-hour line? I walked slowly over to the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage. “Sorry, sir,” the cheerful young man at the gate said to me. “We’re closed until noon.” Thank God.
Abigail arrived shortly after that, and, forgoing the opportunity to walk casually into a lot of Adventures we hadn’t seen—Abigail, it turned out, prefers old familiar Adventures—we returned to It’s a Small World and then had some more carefree rides on the merry-go-round. ♦
(via Instapaper)
This was an interesting aspect which i recently learnt about, people wanting to do something about their circumcision. This is the technology that we are taking about. I wasn't sure why people wanted to do this, till I came across this medical peer reviewed article. I personally think that we shouldn't circumcise babies, its a barbaric custom, akin to FGM. And to say that it reduces AIDS is stupid, there are quite a variety of ways that one can beat AIDS. And why take the choice away from babies? They aren't sexually active are they? And if they want to avoid aids by having their foreskin removed, they can do it when they are sexually mature and can take proper decisions.
I quote:
If a man is circumcised, he faces an increased risk of experiencing delayed orgasm, and his female partner has an increased risk of not feeling sexually fulfilled.
This is the clear-cut conclusion of a new Danish research article, which has received international attention.
Some 5,000 sexually active men and women were surveyed about their experiences and possible problems with their sex lives. With a specific focus on circumcised men and their women, the results are startling.
“Circumcised men are three times as likely to experience a frequent inability to reach an orgasm,” says one of the researchers, associate professor Morten Frisch of SSI, a Danish research, production and service enterprise.
Research into the effects on women is unique
This is one of only a few studies of the sexual consequences of male circumcision, and in one area in particular it is groundbreaking:
“Previous studies into male circumcision have looked at the effects it has on the men. But scientists have never really studied the effects this has on the women's sex lives,” says Frisch.
“It appears that women with circumcised men are twice as likely to be sexually frustrated. They experience a three-fold risk of frequent difficulties in achieving orgasm, and an eight-fold risk of feeling pain during intercourse – also known as dyspareunia.”
Circumcised men prefer it rough
The study has received international attention. Politicians from California, for example, have been in contact with the researchers because they want to ban circumcision in their federal state. (Photo: Colourbox)
There appears to be a very simple reason why circumcised men and their partners are having problems with their sex lives.
The circumcised man develops a thin layer of hard skin on his penis head, which decreases the sensitivity. This means that in order to reach an orgasm, he needs to work harder at it, and that can lead to a painful experience for the woman.
“We conducted a survey, but the data does not explain why these problems occur. There are, however, some good suggestions in the scientific literature,” he explains.
When the penis enters the vagina, the foreskin is pulled back. And on its way out again, the foreskin goes back to cover the penis head. This way the foreskin stimulates both the man and the woman.
The gliding in-and-out movement of the foreskin, combined with the in-and-out movement inside the vagina, constitutes what is known as ‘the gliding movement’.
“When a circumcised man moves in and out of a woman without 'the gliding movement' caused by the foreskin, it can have a painful effect on the woman's mucous membrane. This could explain the pain and the tendency towards dryness that some women with circumcised men experience.”
Sources of error were filtered out
A vast majority of the circumcised men in the study were circumcised based on a doctor's estimate.
Facts
In the U.S. some 50 percent of all boys are circumcised.
Circumcision is – or rather has been – common in many English-speaking countries. This is due to a trend from the Victorian age where doctors recommended that boys should be circumcised as this would make it more difficult to masturbate.
At the time, masturbation was thought to lead to a long list of problems, including mental illness and typhus.
“Only five percent of all Danish men are circumcised, yet we have statistically valid evidence that male circumcision can be associated with sexual problems.
The study did not involve many religiously circumcised men – Jews and Muslims, for example. But even with these factors taken into account, the data pointed in the same direction. The statistical analyses also took a long list of additional relevant factors into account, including:
- Age
- Cultural background
- Religious background
- Marital status
- Levels of education
- Household income
- Age at first intercourse
- Number of sex partners
- Frequency of sexual activity with one partner in the past year
“We adjusted for all these factors in an attempt to ensure that circumcision is the actual cause, and that the link isn’t attributable to other factors.”
Bottom-line results were clear
Frisch mentions an example of how things get muddled up if researchers do not adjust for possible sources of error when they work with statistics:
“If, for instance, you look at people who drink lots of beer, you'll see that they face an increased risk of developing lung cancer, compared to those who don't drink much,” he says. “But it's not the drinking itself that causes the lung cancer. There just happens to be a correlation between drinking and smoking, and it is actually the smoking that causes the lung cancer.”
These kinds of error sources were taken into account, and the bottom-line results were clear:
“We’re seeing a consistent picture. Even though most circumcised men – and their women – do not have problems with their sex lives, there is a significantly larger group of circumcised men and their female partners who experience frequent problems in achieving orgasm, compared to couples where the man is not circumcised.”
Facts
Narrowed foreskin is popularly known as ‘Spanish Collar’ and scientifically as ‘phimosis’.
For half a century, large surveys have shown that problems with phimosis sort themselves out in childhood for up to 99% of boys. Nevertheless, this condition is still being used as a major argument for routine circumcision in many countries.
In addition, there are significantly more women with circumcised men, who experience vaginal pains during intercourse or feel that their sexual needs are not met.
Further studies needed
Frisch hopes this new study will be replicated by researchers in other countries and cultures.
“That way we can ascertain whether this phenomenon applies to Danes only or whether it extends into other cultures too,” he says. “All in all, I have a humble approach to our findings, so I would also like to see whether other Danish studies would reach the same conclusions.”
Study resonates internationally
According to Frisch, the study has received a great deal of international attention. For example, he has been contacted by politicians in California, who are very pleased with the results of the study because they want to ban circumcision in their federal state.
Others are less excited, saying the research is controversial.
“This is a highly sensitive issue, and some people oppose the publication of this kind of research. Some people have actually tried to stop the publication of our article,” he explains.
A question of ethics
Certain groups and individuals are lobbying in favour circumcising all men, explains Frisch. Not necessarily out of religious concern, but because they believe that circumcision has a health-promotional effect. In Africa, for instance, there are indications that circumcision could reduce the risk of HIV infection.
Dear Son
Here is an interesting email that I got referring to facts of life. One thing which you will notice is that this is quite brutal. As you would know, i am an incurable optimist and dreamer, wishing impossible wishes and dreaming impossible dreams. In terms of challenges, son, I have rarely come across anything that I couldn't do if I put my mind to it. But there are some limitations definitely, like my naval career due to my medical issues etc. etc. But these facts of life are interesting if brutal. Worth remembering son, because this provides you with rules which you can live with. I wont disagree with anything that's written here. Lets see, first the rules and then i will note my views on these rules which you can ignore if you wish. But its surprising how many people do not believe in these rules. That's because people don't know themselves. If you know yourself, then you will be one in a million.
Michael Yon, one of my favourite photographers, came across this poster on a wall in Afghanistan.
My Persian (which is related to Dari) or if this is Pushto means that I cannot translate it but I found it fascinating that all these symbols, usually related to Christianity, ancient Egyptian and some hand symbols are all considered to be signs of the devil.
We are advertising for more trustees at Home Start Hillingdon. Here’s one which went into the Women in Technology Group.
3 - Enthusiastic volunteer trustees required for Home-Start, the UK’s leading family support charity
Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity - they support families struggling to cope with young children who with serious problems such as mental illness, alcoholism etc. Home-Start train volunteers (who are themselves parents) who then work with social services, health, police, etc. to recover the family and avoid the children being put into care (each child in care costs up to £50,000) and Home-Start have managed to intervene in about 100 families per year over the last 12 years or so in Hillingdon. They have had a few trustee retirements recently and they would like to increase the number of trustees who have experience in fund raising. This is a high governance charity (since they work with children) and would appeal to people who want to gain board level experience of running a firm. They also have three MPs as their trustees and work closely with the local council. It would also ideally suit people who are within commuting distance of Hillingdon (north west London) as they hold their monthly meetings there and fund raising takes place in and around Hillingdon. In particular Home-Start Hillingdon would like to seriously increase the amount of technology they use - such as having revenue generating efforts through a web shop, having a better website, providing financial education to their families via mobile or e-learning, providing e-coaching, assisting the volunteers with knowledge sharing on the website, better Facebook/social media interaction etc. So somebody who has an interest in applying technology to assist and help fundraise would be ideal. Trustees can expect to spend around 12 hours a month on this rewarding role which enables much needed support for vulnerable families. For more information please contact Bhaskar Dasgupta, an existing Home-Start Hillingdon Trustee, on 07545 236 207 orbhaskar.dasgupta@hsbc.com or Tanya Link, Office Manager at Home-Start Hillingdon, on 01895 252804 or office@homestart-hillingdon.org.uk.
In other aspects relating to HSH, I had a nice meeting with LSE SIFE team and HSH Senior Coordinator and we agreed to push for more financial education training to our great volunteers and the families. We will do the first pilot run in Q1 2012 and then see how we can improve the offering. If it works out, it would be brilliant. The LSE SIFE team has been doing great, they have hooked up with Microsoft, did a great job in reviewing the current offerings for financial education out there and have got a full fledged team working on this. Good stuff chaps.
The background to this is important. The families which we help, are usually one step away from calamity and total disintegration. While the volunteers help in recovering these families, if we can give them some help with improving their financial condition, that would be brilliant. The kids wont have problems, well, not too many, but will be able to get the little bit extra. So I am very chuffed about this..
First the story.
The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has announced that any local authority planning to increase council tax by 3.5% or more will be required to hold a referendum asking local people to endorse the move.
Pickles described the move as a radical extension of direct democracy, but it is also likely to deter many councils from risking the judgment of their council-tax-payers.
Now will this also be applied for other taxes such as income, petrol, VAT etc. etc. ? no? i didn't think so, you hypocritical morons, stop spending my money!
Dear Son
Here is an interesting article on what banks are asking for in their new recruits into the private banking world. You should be considering what would be good for you. You are numerate and you are very personable. What you are missing out on is the multi-lingual aspect.
Being multilingual helps, son, it helps you have a broader appreciation of the world, know about other cultures, be able to understand others. More importantly, it helps you make more money and be more successful in business. So if you are considering improving yourself, have a think about trying to improve on your language skills. If nothing else, try to get your Hindi up to speed, its not difficult, we can all speak Hindi at home. You should also consider other languages such as Mandarin or Spanish. It will really help you to a considerable degree. I am not saying that you need to be an expert, you need to have conversational skills and at the most, be able to read a newspaper, that's enough for the requirements of business.
Have a think, Mamma has some basic Hindi books at home, perhaps we all can start on it? Do you think that will help?
Love
Baba
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9befe24-f991-11e0-bf8f-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1eKLB1Ut2
Search for talent: Only the trilingual, numerate and personable need apply
By Elaine Moore
What skills make the perfect wealth manager?
Charm, certainly. Contacts, maybe. But as the private banking industry seeks to attract a new generation of clients across a wider map than ever before, a new set of talents is in demand.
Multilingual, personable graduates equally at ease discussing complex structured products and safe haven assets are needed by private banks to fill offices in some of the world’s fastest growing economies.
But finding the right recruits is not easy.
HSBC has increased the number of places on its graduate scheme in the last year, but requirements are tough.
Prospective hires must be proficient in at least three languages, have a strong academic background and a genuine enthusiasm for the financial world, says Charles Hoffman, managing director at HSBC Private Bank.
Those who make the grade are offered a four- to eight-week graduate programme, followed by three six-month rotations, during which they are seated with experienced private bankers who specialise in client relationship management, support functions or product development. At the end of the process the new recruits should be ready to take on their own clients.
Carol Costa joined the HSBC scheme from her home country of Brazil and is embedded in the London office on her first rotation.
She says the worldwide movement and opportunity to spend time with senior management is an amazing way to start a career, although the reality of training has differed from her expectations of instant glamour and client meetings.
The first month of technical instruction underlined the fact that a career in private banking requires knowledge of services and products, not just client relationship building.
And finding the people with the right mix of talents who can fulfil these roles can be hard. In search of fresh pools of talent many private banks have been increasingly turning to lateral hires.
Coutts, one of the UK’s oldest private banks, has launched a pilot programme aimed at employees in different areas of the financial industry as well as its own staff who understand the high net worth market and can be trained in its own platform and products to become private bankers.
The bank has been explicit about its hopes to drive up revenue in its overseas business by more than half in the next few years.
Along with much of the industry, it is hoping to expand its remit from conventional private banking to investment management, and has raised its minimum requirement for investable assets that clients must hold from £500,000 to £1m.
Seeking out those with a non-private banking background who may have the right relationship skills, or have experience in a particular area outside the world of wealth management, has been a success, says Elsa Critchley, head of HR at Coutts.
This is particularly the case in those markets where there is a wide shortage of quality private bankers, such as Asia.
In countries that lack a large pool of candidates from which to pick, other banks have been setting up schools to train graduates in the art of wealth management.
Credit Suisse runs its own corporate university with a business school in Singapore and Hong Kong. Citigroup has also run a wealth management associates programme at Citi Private Bank Asia Pacific since 2006 to funnel a pool of potential employees through its doors.
But the effort involved pays off, according to Paul Patterson, global head of trust at RBC Wealth Management, and goes beyond the individual’s contribution to the bank.
“Our experience is that our graduate trainees relate to, and become important advocates of, our corporate culture, which we see as a key differentiator in the market,” he says.
But smaller wealth managers without the resources to set up their own schools or schemes have had to take a more informal approach.
Société Générale Private Banking Hambros says it uses a variety of methods to find and develop wealth managers.
“Being a relatively small bank we do not have a formal structured graduate trainee scheme,” says Phil Mcilwraith, group commercial director. “Our approach is more informal, recruiting both experienced wealth managers and other individuals with the potential to succeed.”
This process allows managers to work with SGPB Hambros teams in different locations or in different parts of the organisation.
The scheme may be less formal, but the time the bank spends educating new recruits on its own product range is substantial, and reducing attrition is essential for schemes like this one to earn its keep.
The answer, according to some, is to ensure that graduates forge connections across the bank that will last beyond the specific time of the training scheme. In other words: mentors.
HSBC, for example, appoints mentors who are responsible for graduates throughout their rotations and can provide guidance, support and encouragement during and after the programme.
This year Coutts began a slightly different mentoring model. Its reverse mentoring scheme requires young members of the private bank, typically graduate trainees, to be allocated senior executives and tasked with educating them in the mysterious world of social networking, virals and trolls in a process that lasts between six months to a year.
The purpose is to help senior bank staff gain a better grip of the ways that young clients might communicate and interact – typically through technology – and to encourage new employees to make connections with established bankers.
Coutts says it plans to roll out the scheme across all of its offices.
Dear Son
quite an interesting article, on investing mistakes that the chap made. Pretty straightforward but worth following.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57324728/avoid-these-three-money-mistakes/?tag=nl.e713
MoneyWatch) Financial planner and New York Times blogger Carl Richards created a stir when he wrote How A Financial Pro Lost His House earlier this month. It was a gut wrenching true story of how he got caught up in the real estate bubble in Las Vegas and eventually lost his home via a short sale after the meltdown. It created quite the controversy in the financial planning community as planners debated whether he did a service to the public or hurt the reputation of the financial planning industry. I come down on the side that he did the right and courageous thing, since his willingness to share his experience gives us all the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. I've written about some of my blunders before and have to tell you that this pro had no trouble coming up with my biggest three money mistakes. So I'll match my friend Carl and raise him by two blunders.
Gold was going to make me rich
I bought gold in the last gold bubble back in 1979 with the college graduation money I received from my parents. I've written about this blunder before, noting I was sure I was going to be rich. Fast forward 32 years and I haven't even kept up with inflation. Had I put that graduation money in the stock market, it would be worth ten times the amount the gold is worth today.
My only excuse was that, back in 1979, behavioral finance hadn't yet been invented and I didn't realize I was merely following the herd. In hindsight, I came to consider this my best investment ever. Certainly not because it was all that lucrative, but rather because it taught a freshly minted college graduate who was ready to take on the world that he wasn't as smart as he thought. Further, it was the defining event that made me into the indexer I am today.I bought way too much house
Though Carl may have lost his house, I bought too much house. My wife and I left Aspen, Colorado in 2000 and moved to Colorado Springs. While the two are only 100 miles apart geographically, housing prices could not have been more different. Houses were less than a tenth of the price of glitzy Aspen and utilities were dirt cheap at the time.
I made the classic mistake of buying an enormous 6,000 square foot house with 20 foot ceilings for a family of three. I'd love to blame it on my wife, but the truth is that I was the one who fell in love with the house and drove the decision to buy it. Today, we are spending a fortune on utilities and maintenance for a house we would be lucky to fetch what we paid for it 11 years ago. The short-term pleasure I felt from owning the big house with the great view has long since passed. Anyone know where I could get a good price on replacing a rotting deck?
The lesson I learned is that even real estate is a risky investment and the cost of maintaining it takes away from the pleasure of having a lot of space with a great view. I underestimated the value of simplicity and now, with our son less than five years from heading off to college, wish we had chosen to buy a small tract home with maintenance provided by a homeowner's association.I bought stuff rather than experiences
Ever since I was a kid I remember that if I spent money on something like a movie or a concert, it would soon be over and I'd have nothing to show for it except a memory. On the other hand, if I bought tangible stuff, I'd have it forever and be able to always enjoy it. It turns out that my logic was all wrong.
Life is about being happy and satisfied and all of the research shows that experiences have a far bigger impact on happiness than stuff. For a long time, I focused on the price tag and tended to skimp while on vacations or when attending a ball game or theater. I mean, it's the same game or play regardless of where you're sitting, right?
Today, I'm loosening up and starting to splurge a bit with some seats near the 50 yard line and having the family swim with the dolphins in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The latter is a memory all three of us will cherish for a long time and discuss fondly.
This last mistake is something that will take me a long time to improve on. I'm pre-progammed to accumulate money, which happens to make it difficult for me to actually spend it. Money is stored energy and I'm having a hard time using some of that energy I've worked so hard to accumulate. Yet I know I can't be buried with it.
Embrace your mistakes
If you think being a financial professional means you don't make money mistakes, think again. I applaud Carl Richards for being so upfront about how he lost his house and I have a long list of destructive money behaviors that often get the better of me.
It's easy to celebrate what we do right and even easier to blame others when something goes wrong. It's a lot harder to embrace mistakes, talk about them openly, and make changes going forward.
Warren Buffett is the world's most successful living investor and he seems to have no issues discussing his biggest blunders. Perhaps he is such a great investor because he owned up to and learned from his mistakes. If your financial pro has trouble coming up with his money mistakes, you may want to be be a bit concerned.
You do need to have a house always. A place to stay. Of course, you will always have a place to stay with us, son, but that's not really something that you might want to think as your permanent place of residence as you will have your wife and kids and and and. But you shouldn't speculate that much on houses, don't buy too big a house as then you have to maintain it and and and. Also remember, its for you to live in, not to show off to others. The day the others pay your bills, you can show off to them, but till then, tell them to bog off. Remember that Warren Buffet lives in a tiny house despite him being able to buy millions of them…
Gold is another interesting investment son, one should have some gold in hand in terms of the ultimate security, but to speculate on it? hmmm, not sure…And well, buying experiences is much better than stuff.
