I’m right now enjoying a cup of coffee while blogging here at Starbucks Valley Point, feeling like Tim Harford for a moment. I finally tried the ‘Cappuccino Short’ here in a Starbucks in Singapore and frankly, at $4.80, I’d rather settle for a Tall. It is a very small cup when you do the takeaway – I haven’t really tried testing whether the takeaway size is the same as the one you drink on the spot. When I do try measuring eventually, perhaps I’d come up with an economic explanation for any discrepancies.
The usual take is that takeaways are smaller in packaging because part of the money you pay goes to paying for the paper cup as well as the cup sleeve (which is supposedly made from 45% less material than another paper cup – I wonder why this comparison is even made). I found no reason to disagree yet but if the amount ends up being the same then we could always explain that by drinking on the spot, the sum that would go into paying for the paper cup goes into paying for your spot in the Starbucks Cafe (sort of like a rental). Economists have this knack of explaining everything but it is likely that a truth is a mixture of the possibilities proposed in different sort of economic explanations.
GOH Gift
Anyways I just left the Hwa Chong Alumni Association from the end of the Hwa Chong Alumni Association Youth Chapter Investiture. This youth chapter, started a few months back, is now officiated and ready to take in new members to join us with activities to help our juniors still in school and also organize events for us to get together. Yi Da got me into the Youth Chapter and soon after that I got so much tasking I’m inevitably a committee member. In particular, I was made to write the gift for our Investiture GOH.
I guess it’s a fun experience working with those students 1 to 3 years our seniors (and the especially old ones who graduated from Chinese High like 20 years or so before we were even born). Another reason I’ve become busier these days. It’s 145 more days to go before ORD right now and having slogged hard for in-camp life, I’ve become really tired of army and hoping NS life would end soon. It seems to be the same feeling for my batch mates as well. I just hope all these busying in civilian life would help time pass faster.
A couple of weeks back when Kwang Guan and I met for dinner with a bunch of friends, we started chatting about studying in university, the issue of studying overseas and scholarship. Me being one of the poor kid who have got a place in an overseas university and yet to get a scholarship, Kwang Guan exclaimed that there is one scholarship that will fund me overseas that I’d definitely be able to get. Being naive (which is probably why I haven’t got a scholarship), I asked what before the answer dawned on me – MOE Scholarship.
News has it that MOE is desperate for teachers and Marcus, my MOE Scholar friend tells me there’s probably 70-80 overseas scholars from MOE in this year. It is an amazing figure, almost equals to the total number of PSC scholars this year. And perhaps what Kwang Guan say is very right, I’ll be able to get their scholarship. I’ve been a rather patient person and I’ve been helping classmates with school work since I started discovering the joy of learning. I’ve been looking to inspire people around me to love learning, especially academic knowledge. I’m ever-ready to share things I know about the world and to pick up new things I’ve never been exposed to.
I just got to know this new friend in camp and he told me I’m very academic. I guess I do seem very much so in camp, always reading something, and ‘flaunting’ my knowledge in my conversations with people. It is not always a good thing to know a lot because people have a hard time tracking if you’re still at the topic or moved on to something else. Desmond told me I’ve the habit of using jargons people struggle with. Of course there are times when it is fun because you can talk to almost anyone even when they are interested in disciplines so far-fetched from the normal ones and with lots of information about different things, you might be able to develop a conversation on something you don’t quite know to something you know a bit about and then expand your knowledge from there.
If that is the case, then why not teach? My case for not entering teaching career is sometimes forgotten because I don’t use it frequently and normally I just employ my instinctive distaste for working in a school as an excuse for not getting into teaching. I’m well aware that the Ministry probably need people like me, interested to inspire, willing to work long hours, don’t mind sacrificing for students and rather bold with creative stuff. Unfortunately, I am not interested in them enough, primarily because I understand that at the end of the day, the scores of the students is almost everything to the student and the parents and as a teacher, no matter how I’d like students to be imbued with the love of learning, if this love doesn’t translate into practical examination results, I am not a good teacher and I’ve failed, both administratively and ideologically. Touting an ideology of hoping to inspire rather than instruct, I am essentially more of teaching about life than about things in the world – an inherent misfit in the world of education.
Lead. Care. Inspire. probably idealizes what I think should be plain necessity in education and in a field like this, my life work to-be is going to take forever to accomplish.
I remember learning this from Tim Harford once, perhaps in his blog; I stumbled upon this just now on Slate.com article by Tim Harford – which I do suspect is the same one I saw on ft.com (suggesting that he submits an article to multiple sites anyways). I decided to blog about it so I might remind myself to try. Some time at the end of next week when I’m out of camp I’ll be in front of a Starbucks counter asking for ‘Cappuccino Short’ and checking out how much I’m going to be charged for it.
Just yesterday afternoon, while I was having lunch with my Mum, my sis called.
Sis: Ma, the security machines here are all going crazy, they beep whenever I pass by them and staff from the shops have to check my bag and stuff before I leave the shops
Mum: All the shops in Vivocity?
Sis: A lot, like Topman, GAP and so on. It’s super irritating and everyone is looking at me like I’m some thief.
Mum: Are you carrying anything with the security tag or something?
Sis: No, it beeps even when I pass by it without my bag!
Mum: Could it be your braces?
Sis: Cannot be! Last few times I go out also don’t have.
Mum: I think their machine all crazy lor, I guess you either go somewhere sit and eat or just window shop. Aiyah, you better just come home la.
Today, when I was once again having lunch with my Mum, my sister called again.
Sis: Ma, it’s happening again here at Ion Orchard! It’s beeping everywhere when I enter and leave the shops! It’s super scary like the all the shopping places conspire against me!
Mum: Oh my god, I think should really should ask them to check the stuff on you one by one; bring it to the counter and ask them what is the thing on you that’s causing the beeping.
Hours later, it turned out that despite checking everything in my sister’s bag, clothes, accessories, handphone and wallet, there was nothing that beeps at the security gantry but it simply happens when she walks pass it. A senior salesperson at Topshop (I assume it’s the experience and not the age) comes by and asked my sis, “Are you wearing ZARA shoes?”. And that solved the entire mystery that lasted 2 whole days, troubled my Mum because my sister whined all day about how she might never be able to shop in peace ever again and totally irritated my sister who cares very much about her image when she’s shopping and was absolutely disturbed by the prospects of not being able to shop.
My sister stomped into the ZARA (and even had to queue for a while at the cashier) and said “These 2 days almost every shop I walk into, the security gantry all beep! The Topshop girl told me these ZARA shoes were the reason!”. The salesgirl requested for her ‘right’ shoe, despite how ‘wrong’ it was, causing every security gantry to beep and did her magic.
Moral of the story? Get your shoes from Topshop instead.
It’s great to go out with friends again and today (or rather yesterday since 12am passed) we went around Ion Orchard, one of the latest new malls opened along Orchard Road to look around. For me, it’s the very first time since it opened and I guess I was pretty much a country bumpkin when it comes to shopping stuff although I live pretty close to town.
The entire mall is basically divided into the high-class stuff at the upper levels and the more ordinary, typical-mall stuff in the basements. The basement stretches to B4 and the deepest floor actually houses all the food places. The bad thing about that is that smell of food don’t escape properly and the ventilation seems somewhat problematic. I was feeling pretty uncomfortable at that level and was suffering from a bad headache then.
But well, I might be able to go on and on about the design of malls, placement of retail outlets and so on if I were an architect. Unfortunately, I’m just an economist so I decided to work on the question of why do we so often get conned at restaurants.
The Facts
We had dinner at Imperial Treasure Restaurant; Wenjie and I ordered a plate of Roast Pork which cost us $8.00 SGD (that’s before 10% Service Charge and a subsequent 7% GST, which simply put, is about 17.77% worth of additional money) to share.
In the economy, many things are about faith and trust. We trust the restaurant to serve us food worthy of the prices we pay and that they will not scam us by compromising on the quality of our food. This is how we even decided to step into the restaurant. Unfortunately, while economic theory describes that we pay $8.00 for that Roast Pork because the market supply and market demand meets at that point for the product (which in this case, also includes the plates, services, ambience, queuing system for rationing seats in the restaurant to the crowd waiting outside and the list goes on), the fact is we don’t. We didn’t even properly assessed the product before ordering and we lacked information, we went ahead nevertheless in faith of the market and with a trust in Imperial Treasure Restaurant. And here’s where the idea of Perfect Competition actually breaks down totally.
From our perspective, we were coerced into paying 8 bucks for that pathetic 9 small pieces of Roast Pork that is usually worth less than 2 bucks outside, even when you include the prices of that 12 tiny little roasted peanuts used as garnish and that English Parsley which we failed to consume anyways. Could we have cancelled the order when we realised how pathetic the portion of food was? Perhaps, but we didn’t try – which is another sign of the power of the producer. There was little we could do and that is disappointing. All we can say is “Not going to order this again if we come here” and that’s the little pinch of consumer power we have.
There’s way too much power in the hands of our dear producers and I thus decided to exert my consumer force right here and right now. No more Roast Pork from Imperial Treasure Restaurant!
I haven’t devote much attention to blogging my personal life over here as I started moving all my academic matters over to ERPZ. It’s especially fun to read things when you know you’re going to review them, log your thoughts and share these ideas with friends. More importantly, seeing the application of things you read and discover in your life is something wonderful. This is especially important for students of GP because living in this world means we would have plenty of experience and observations waiting to be expressed – not through grumblings to your family and friends, nor through rambling on your blog but through the essays that you write.
And to pen stuff on ERPZ, I’ve been busy reading, sourcing for interesting stuff over the web and in library. EduDelta might seriously be not even seeing the face of the world at all and when that happens the sub-domain is going to disappear. We have had too much trouble with people. It’s a very people sort of problem at EduDelta – we are unable to find people who are committed enough to work on the ideas that we have despite their brilliance and in many sense we have been over-ambitious and presumptuous about the kindness of people. There are many lessons that we learnt from this experience and I believe I might eventually come up with a pamphlet describing our journey.
Just yesterday, Peng Sing approached me with the idea to conduct Project Work lessons; some sort of tuition. As a ‘model’ student in the past, I’ve my own system of doing things and more often than not I force people to use my system when I guide them. I’ve my own system to work on Project Work with all the sensible justification and explanation for each of the methods I adopt to excel in every part of the assessment. So yea, why not share this system with the rest of the people and allow them to benefit from it? I might end up rather busy with this.
On a final note, I found this Economics Publication Insights and I’m terribly intrigued by it. I might write to the editor to ask if she interested in having my contributions. Life is only going to get busier.
