Vegetarianism

Irina makes no bones about her views on vegetarians.

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Interviewer: You mainly serve meat dishes?

Irina: What kind of a life is it without lamb and beef and chicken? How can I make my stock? How can add zing to my dishes?

Interviewer: You don’t do vegetarian dishes at all?

Irina: Oh I can do vegetarian. I can throw together a stuffed eggplant and pass that off as veg. At eight euros a plate it makes a good profit too.

Interviewer: What do you think of people who are vegetarians?

Irina: All that stuff about the body being a temple? No animal protein allowed inside? It’s unhealthy? Let me tell you something. Every vegetarian I know catches cold soon as the sun goes in. Can I get you a lamb wrap?

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Analogue digital mix

Amid an exchange of abbreviations, Gerhard helps Ned get his car going.

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Gerhard: Maybe the EST has a bit of H20 in it.

Ned: It’s not a DIS system.

Gerhard: No, this is an oddity, this box on the coil, it does the EST work, then sends the current to a distributor. Here, just hold the DVOM a sec will you?

Ned: Odd, isn’t it. No EFI, but it has ESC.

Gerhard: It was the 80s, they were mixing it. Bits were analogue, bits were digital.

 

Voice-over

Brevity, through abbreviations, brings engineers closer together.

EST = electronic spark timing

DIS = distributorless ignition system

DVOM = digital volt-ohmmeter

EFI = electronic fuel injection

ESC = electronic spark control

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A rolling stone gathers moss

Sindbad tells the Roc to let him down near the men on the mountain.

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Sindbad: Over there, near the men who've come to collect the diamonds.

Roc: But you have diamonds.

Sindbad: Sure. But I don’t know the way home. The men waiting, they know the way.

Roc: OK, so you give them some diamonds and they tell you the way.

Sindbad: Good thinking. But I go home, I have no diamonds, everyone laughs, and they say a rolling stone gathers no moss.

Roc: Give the men only half the diamonds.

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Voice-over

Sindbad, eternal rolling stone, rewrites the proverb. A rolling stone gathers no moss? A rolling stone CAN gather moss. Squirrel a bit away on your travels. Fly Roc Air.  RocAir.com.

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Foreign language initiatives

Kevin and George discuss foreign language training.

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Kevin: I was impressed to hear you allocated 114 million dollars for foreign language programs in the U.S.

George: Yeah? Language is an important aspect of speaking, I mean it’s important to language well. And to learn another… er language.
Kevin: Well my goal is that by 2020, we have every Australian student studying a foreign language.
George: That’s good. Every student?
Kevin: It’s for our future security and prosperity, and about having a vision to make Australia the most Asia literate country in the collective West. But I was curious why you targeted the learning of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Farsi.
George: Learning somebody else's language is a kind gesture. It really is a fundamental way to reach out to somebody and say, I care about you.
Kevin: I know what you mean. Hu Jintao said the same thing when I made that speech in Mandarin.
George: Course we also need intelligence officers, who, when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, knows what they're talking about. We need interrogators.
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Voice-over

Kevin Rudd’s initiative is laudable and should be supported. Nevertheless, learning another language, especially tonal languages like Chinese or Thai, takes time and effort. And employing someone who is say, an Australian-born Chinese who has a business degree, is better than employing an native English speaking Australian who has a business degree and a couple of years of Chinese language study.

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Meeting a Storm Trooper

Agog meets the Tokyo Storm Trooper.

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Agog: Finally get to meet you.

Storm Trooper: Nice to see you. Thanks for coming.

Agog: Odd. We’ve met so many times online, and now I actually get to meet you, well, you look just like your picture.

Storm Trooper: Thank you.

Agog: Doesn’t Lucas ever say, hey you can’t look like that, you can’t impersonate a storm trooper?

Storm Trooper: Nope. I’m a volunteer storm trooper. I sing and dance for charity.

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Voice-over

Nice touch on Storm Trooper’s part including a reflexive motif in the background. Wonder what the position is on impersonating a police officer for charity?

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Reflexivity vs benign equilibrium

Chatting in the soup line…

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Georgina: The market doesn’t just seek a benign equilibrium. There’s what we might call reflexivity involved. Which is…

Roberta: You put too much emphasis on behavioral finance. If you could figure more than one variable at once…

Georgina: I’m not claiming I’m great at simultaneous equations. What I am saying is that economists don’t take into account the power that people have to drive the market. Times are good, people buy stocks. They buy more stocks, companies buy other companies and sell those stocks. Optimism is everywhere. Rationality is thrown overboard, the prices are too high, it’s all unsustainable and a crash comes. Then everyone panics, they sell off wildly, the prices plunge, often way below their real value, but the investors are too scared to come back to the market for a long time. For months. Sometimes for years.

Roberta: That’s what you call reflexivity?

Georgina: People looking inward, not looking out. It’s a factor. Taking account of psychology drove the Quantum Fund up 4000 percent  between 1970 to 1980 when the market went up only 50 percent. And four weeks is all it took for people to panic and halve the value of their pension funds.

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Voice-over

At times like these are not only new crises to cope with but new ideas to explain what went wrong. But it may be small comfort even when you know why it all happened.

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