Family and the economy (Long Post)

I am not an expert on the economy, nor am I an expert on families and social institutions. I am just an engineer who is applying his analytical skills to a situation.

I was reading this website about the breakdown of the family unit and religious organizations in Western Europe, the authors conducted a study in Poland and came to one conclusion, the breakdown of the family unit is adversely affecting the Polish economy. This is definitely true to a certain extent throughout Western Europe, birth rates are dropping, their ethnic balance is being skewed by immigration, economic growth is slowing down and their companies are being snapped up by Chinese and Indian investors, all in all there is a lack of vitality in their society.

That got me thinking, and I did some research on China, the family unit is a very strong institution in China, a Chinese family is a basically a unit in Chinese society led by a father/husband and everyone else just follows his lead. Even though there are increasing number of divorces and the number of single parent families are increasing in China, the Chinese government has so far responded by not helping single parents as most Western countries like the USA and UK have.

The Chinese government definitely studied the breakdown of the family unit in Western society and the issues that it causes. There is no support for single families at all in China. I think the Chinese government believes that supporting single parent families actually encourage the propagation of single parent families and the breakdown of the family unit. They want to avoid that at all cost, I think they know that part of the vitality of the Chinese economy is due to strong families. Parents work, grandparents take care of the children, children don't grow up messed up in the head, children become productive members of society. That seems to be their line of thinking.

I don't know how their decisions will pan out, but I am quite certain it will be interesting to compare and contrast the differences between a developed asian country and a developed european/american country in the years to come.

Salt Of The Earth!

I have two colleagues who shall go unnammed, they are great colleagues!

They keep me rooted into the here and now.

They plan carefully and prudently.

People like that are not appreciated enough and are often accused of being stuck in the mud and holding more ambitious peple back.

But that is not true, without people like that nothing will ever get documented, nothing will ever get planned properly and when the chips fall people like that get hit the worse.

So here is a tribute to the steady, solid and reliable colleague!

It is people like them that make striving to build the greatest company on Earth worthwhile.

Here's to you guys, you know who you are! :D

The exploration of PHP

I've been playing with PHP the past couple of weeks, I've used PHP once in a project a long time ago, it was painful and as difficult to use as ASP Classic.

The IDEs for PHP still sucks, not even Eclipse can hold a candle to the wonderous majesty that is Visual Studio 2k8. The open source guys around me always tell me how great Eclipse is and how it is the way of the future and how it will kick the shit out of Microsoft.

I don't know what Kool-Aid those guys are drinking, because Eclipse for PHP suxx0rs. I hate it, I actually hate it more than I hate Dreamweaver. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a microsoftie, I like tools like Aptana IDE for javascript, it is still the superior platform for javascript. Not even Visual Studio is as good for javascript as Aptana IDE.

Gotta go, don't want my boss to catch me blogging at work :D

Grateful to mom!

I'm really grateful to my mom nowadays for making me do engineering. There is still plenty of engineering jobs around, she was right, you will always need engineers.

You want to build something, you need an engineer, even if you want to tear something down whatever it may be, a building, a car etc... you will need an engineer.

Here's bravo to mom! :D

Barack Obama WINS! Nov 4 2008

HOPE TRIUMPHS!