Friday, October 31, 2008

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What have been violated to be the victim of "Financial Tsunami"?

We love “games” which can be expressed in any of our human activities-study, sports, family, relationship, career, investment, social or political participation, etc.

If you really look to the basic of our universal human rights, they can be linked to this fundamental right: “right to play a game and right to leave a game”. Any game is consisted of “freedom, barriers, purposes and power of choice”. When we know the elements of the game, we can play the game with fun.

However, we sometimes may enter into some games by other determinism, or the barriers are not known or we are not sure our purposes that we can get ourselves easily trapped into the game; and worse we could get stuck to reduce our abilities to leave the game.

So you see that it is not enough to have the right to play or leave a game, but also the abilities to play or leave a game so you can really enjoy any game you choose and have fun in life as only a dead man has no game to play at all. Any game has winner or loser and in some games we have either all winners or all losers. Therefore the ability to play the game includes one’s willingness to be a winner or a loser and know how to be the cause and effect of winning or losing.

Before any game can be brought into the field, we need either ourselves or others or both to design some games based on the above four elements that we can use them to invite other people to play the games. Any game requires game designer(s) and game players.

In fact, any good leaders including government should be able to design good and fair games for their people to play to lead them to have better lives. The government also carries the ethics function with its administrative bodies by making sure the games in the field consisting fair sets of rules that no parties are abused to play the game at disadvantage. Then, you can see why the prosperity of any business or country depends on what kind of games the people are playing to a large degree; and how their right and abilities to play or leave a game are fully protected.

As there can be a lot of players in many games, for example, investment world, sometimes the rules of the games are not known or clear to be unfair to the other players. It’s true that there are some people wearing “black hats” to muddle our field and employ any swindle to cost us a lot of loss that may require regulation or legal means to enforce better rules of the games. But this subsequent solution does not offer us the first layer of protection of our rights.

Before we try to assign total responsibility to other parties including the government and any regulating bodies, what actually have been violated before anyone becomes the victim of the game?

If you don’t know the barriers and the rules of the game, don’t enter it. If you found any unfairness in any game, report them even you may not enter it. If you cannot leave any game, don’t enter it. If you do not have the ability to play the game, don’t enter it until you get the knowledge and ability to play so. If you cannot lose the game or don’t know the magnitude of loss, don’t enter it. If you know the risk or anticipate some uncertainties in the game and still enter it, then please don't blame your luck or others when you somehow lost the game.

If both of the game designers and game players take their own responsibility and the regulators keeping their eyes open all the time to make sure fair sets of rules in place, I believe we have better playing fields that people will have fun as their rights are fully protected.

Many interest groups and political parties if they really want to help any "victims" of "financial tsunami", like the "Lehman Brother mini-bond investors" in Hong Kong, they should also focus to rebuild the first layer of protection of the rights of the games for the victims. Otherwise, they may deprive the rights of the victims to regain their own right and ability to play or leave a game; and worse it may possibly violate the rights of other citizen not in this game but forced to be into this game, like the taxpapers and the shareholders of the related banks.

The real fun of playing any game is to play it with “spirits of play” without any seriousness that you can enjoy with livingness. By itself, you can be senior to any game you are playing. It is time to regain our rights of game, rehabilitate or strengthen our abilities to play the game that we can play both sides of the game: winning and losing.

Be a responsible game designer or game player, we can all be easily "winning" in that type of the game.

Have fun in whatever games you are playing!

P.S. Please feel free to add any comment to my blog(by clicking the small square grey conversation icon on the top right corner next to the title of the post). I will try to write at least one post every week.




Friday, October 24, 2008

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Blog started at a tough time as we are tough beings

I have thought of opening this blog for some time, but finally made it open today at the time of facing such magnitude of risks and uncertainties around us.

Bad news have been falling all over the place especially since the bankruptcy of "Lehman Brothers" in the mid of Sept and more bad news even after various government intervention to salvage our banking and finance sectors across the planet, etc.

Hong Kong has no way to escape but to face this new challenge with turmoils in its economy. It is hardly to tell anyone at the time when our HSI was 30,000 that one year later the free fall of HSI could break below 13,000 at 12,618.

People have started to worry including many executives in Hong Kong. Our "sleepless rate" has increased tremendously at the same time.

If we look back our history, we have experienced various hard time but we did go through and can still survive today.

How can we survive well this time?

As each person has different situation, there will not any fixed and definite solution to every one.

Life can present ourselves with various ramdomities that could easily break our optimal motion to handle our environment. As we are the one who put out our motion (or no motion) to handle our environment, now we may need to take our own responsibility to look and see through the "lies", "false data", etc so to readjust our motion to bring the goodness out of any bad situation you may run into.

The way out is way through.

Probably if you sit into any problem or situation brought by this "financial tsunami", you may try to take an exterior viewpoint to evaluate the way how you handle your finance, job, etc that can break the security zone of your own to bring you loss, anxiety or even sense of insecurity.

There is a good advice from the book of "Problem of Work" written by L. Ron Hubbard , that when we got so much introverted (by looking too much into yourself) , then we needed to get extroverted by taking a walk, looking things as far as possible, and finish walking only after passing the exhaustion point to feel brightened up. Instead of being "sleepless", now you may try this method then you can sleep well after the walk.

Nothing can really offer us guaranteed security including money and job in this world. But we know that there is only one security which is the security of confidence in yourself.

I believe many of us are tough beings. Otherwise, we cannot survive until today.

Why are we tough beings? Because we have not lost the confidence in ourselves: we want to be able to create, determine our own course and make things go right.

The future depends on our confidence in ourselves today. So don't lose it!