Apocalypse Now

Tech companies are no longer the tech companies that they used to be. It is such that tech companies were the high beta plays but now they almost appear to be like traditional brick and mortar companies. There seem to be a new fangled website or company every now and then, but now, tech companies are like the boogie man for everything that is wrong about a risk taking and capitalist society.

The sense is that tech companies is losing it's flavour and they have been slowly replaced by a constant pangs of impending crisis in every turn. There was the Eurozone crisis, then there was jobs crisis, there was the trading scandal crisis, there was the political standoff crisis. Crisis is the new event-driven play. Predict the next crisis and you can predict the next play- it would appear.

But crisis is not new. There have been crisis from the beginning of time, and every time they say there was an apocalypse, miraculously the market will still climb. And when there is calm in the storm, suddenly the market falls off the cliff. Fear is the sure fire way of getting jittery, not the price, and definitely not whether the company is corrupted or well-run or not- but rather a quite unspeakable fear that "something" is going happen. But I have noticed, all the crisis that has been talked about is like asking you to look left and look right before crossing the road, lest you get into an accident. The crisis they talked about almost never materializes.

This crisis is a suspension of your belief that mayhem is coming tomorrow. There have been calls for the end of the world from the Mayan calender, to Mar's landing and an asteroid hitting earth- strangely enough, after 5,000 years of human civilization, no one ever really caught one of these. Likewise for financial markets, every time they say this economy will collapse or that market will fall, it almost never seem happened- and it's market is less than 200 years old. The real crisis happens just when you think nothing is happening.

This fear I suspect is really not as fortuitous one thinks. It's contrived nature, is steeped in mass media culture where reporting of headline-grabbing numbers and statements breeds a sense of uneasiness rather than as a functional communication of data and information.

Reporting that the world will end tomorrow while continuing to report the world will end next week when it doesn't happen tomorrow- the media gets away with it because it is their job to inform rather than to judge. But the net effect of the world's news in half-hour's segment purports to to tell you the world will end tomorrow- with disasters, floods and landslides- while reporting a bush fire in another part of the world next week, it is almost the world is almost really flooding or on fire everyday. The world is so big, some shit is bound to happen somewhere somehow. We just need to pick it for you to read right.

Everyday, there will be another crisis and tomorrow will have some flood and next week there will be earthquake- and if let's say we want to sum up the world's events and report everything, you wouldn't watch the news.

The odds of a Ferrari driven by a mainland Chinese man knocking a taxi cab carrying a Japanese passenger every week is not that big- there are not enough of that in Singapore to cover the whole year, so I suggest that you do not read too much into another crisis of badly behaved foreigners.

Likewise, if you think that China will go into slowdown because the GDP missed by 0.1%- I think you missing the whole point, they have 1.3 billion people and half of them are pretty young. What do young Chinese want more than anything else- more money and jobs right. And does more productivity by many young agile hands perform better than aging albeit elitist and expert hands as an economy- or by extension what is the difference between earning $10,000 a year to $12,000 next year compared with earning $50,000 to $55,000 a year later- the former would find it easier to find jobs, the latter will have to upgrade itself. Unemployment, inflation and other economic issues always crops up- and then if these are crisis, I say most of us would have suffered a heart attack a long time ago.

Therefore similarly tech companies that lose money always existed- companies that lose money existed even before tech companies existed. But companies that existed while other companies lost money also existed. These were crisis even before tech companies faced a crisis- there were crisis even before companies existed. If crisis is a matter of semantics- then I suggest that stretch that definition just a little more, just to fit the modern version because the last I check, a slave loses his head for bringing too warm a water to drink not too long ago. Talk about a crisis.

Crisis ultimately is not to tell you the world is ending tomorrow but rather a crisis of confidence- insofar that you can check your own behaviour- rather than telling you that there is flood in a Pacific island hence it will hit you because a crisis is happening the world; and it is matter of time that it will hit you eventually.

Just so you know, the odds of hitting lottery is better than a apocalypse happening tomorrow because the odds of the former is a finite number and that of the latter is well- nil- because it has never happen before.

Nights

Eugene