Tonight I discuss the gun legislation with a friend during dinner.  He against the citizen are allow to own hand guns, and I take the default libertarian position to support citizen’s freedom to own guns.  He initial argument is hand gun has no practical use, is dangerous and induce damage to things.  I don’t want to use the self defense argument, so I try to counter his arguments one by one.  I use the example of Ferreira racing car to demonstrate no practical use is not a necessary condition to make something illegal.  Then I use archery to  demonstrate something is dangerous in the wrong hands cannot justify the take it away from law binding citizens.  Causing damage to things per se is nothing wrong, except when you start shooting irresponsibly.  However, my friend made a very good point, hand gun is has all these three properties combined, only katana or medieval swords falls in this category to a certain extend.  Then the discuss shifted to where to draw the line marking what’s legal and what’s not.  Fully automatic and high power amour piercing guns is already illegal.  Why should we extend the coverage to hand guns or even rifles but not katana?  Who has the authority to draw this line?  Should we simply use majority rules, so that the minority has to follow the majority regardless of their moral argument?  I don’t have a good answer other than the plain old libertarian argument to support allowing citizens to guns.  Maybe I will think a bit hard to justify the cause when I got my firearm license.

Outsourcing is nothing new to the high-tech industry.  My company is working on the feasibility for the next project and due to the high development cost, the executive wants to explore outsourcing to save some money.  In previous projects, we had good and bad experience with the folks in Indian, mostly bad experience though.  If cost cutting is the only reason for outsourcing, why don’t we outsource the executives instead of the engineers?  They are the biggest expenses and probably the most useless in running the company.  The company does not have any direction for almost a year, we are working on the same old slowly dying product lines, try to milk as much as possible before the reveue disappears.  That’s a no brainer’s job, even a MBA student can do it right.  I am sure the executives in India or China are as component as our executives, probably better.  Just look at the stock price of the Chinese or Indian firms comparing to the stock price of my company, we should know which executives have vision and know how to execute the plan well.  After outsourcing the workers, research and development, the latest trend in outsourcing is the executives.  Actually that make sense if we use Marxist view to analysis how a company runs.  Traditional view is the executives hire workers to work for him, but we can also flip the equation so that the executives are just management professionals hired by the workers collectively to run the company efficient.  Either way, they are the overhead feeding on the productivity of the workers.  If they can’t produce the strategy and vision to direct the company to the right direction, they are just waste the productivity of the workers and they should be replaced.

Today in Toastmasters, I gave a speech telling a moral of a story. It is about how a grumpy old man drive away children playing outside his house.

Mr. Smith is successful businessman. He is the boss of a small but profitable company in town. He has one strange habit. He couldn’t stand noise. He wants the place nice and quiet all the time. He is the boss of the company, so his employee has to lower their voice all the time. Everything is fine until the day he retire. In the first day of his retirement, he woke up by noise outside of his house. He looked through the window. He saw children form the neighborhood are playing outside his house. The children are riding bicycling, chasing each other around, yelling and screaming and making lots of noise. The noise is driving Mr. Smith crazy. He wants to go outside and tell the kids to shut up and leave him alone. As a business man, he knew it won’t work. The kids will simply ignore him and label him the grumpy old man in the block, and he will being a laugh stocks among the neighbors. So he came up with an idea.

He go outside of his house and gathering the children around. He says to them, “I love having children play outside of my house, your laughters really cheers up my day. Here is 25 cents for each of you to show my gratitudes. Please come and play for me more.” Receiving the money, the children are cheer in joy and continue their play. The next day, Mr Smith gather the children outside his house again and says, “Thank you so much for play for me. However, I am a retired old man, I cannot afford much money. Here is 15 cents for each of you showing my sincerity.” The children are a little dismay about the cut in the reward, but 15 cents is still go money, so they disband in joy and continue their play. On the third day, Mr. Smith gather the children again and says, “I am really broke today and I can only afford 5 cents to have you kids playing for me.” At the point, the children are really upset for receiving so little money and they tell Mr. Smith, “What! Only 5 cents. What a mean old man. We are not going to play for you anymore. Let move out play in the end of the street.” Finally, Mr. Smith can enjoy his relaxing, nice and quiet day.

The moral of this story: Sometimes the withdraw of positive reinforcement is as effective as negative reinforcement.  Another moral of this story: Don’t get conditioned for doing something that you like.  Remember why you do it in the first place, you do it for the fun of doing it, not other rewards.  The rewards are just bonus, don’t let it bother you.

When I was driving home today, I listened to the phone-in radio program.  It was talking about the provincial government is planning to introduce standardized test to grade 4 and grade 7 school children.  The teacher union oppose this idea, saying that will increase their work load and more test will give pressure to the children which is not good for their development.  They worry that in order to get good grades, the children have to work on drills for the test instead of learning real stuff.  Some audience phoned in supporting the teachers and say practicing for exam is a waste of time.  I think that audience is either out of school for too long or he is fairly uneducated, otherwise whom would believe the BS of the teacher.  I understand the teachers may be overworked by the new tests, which it is fair to request more resource to cope with the extra teaching requirements.  However, please don’t trash talk the new tests system just because you want to have less work.  Exam techniques is one of the most valuable skill I have learned in school.  You may have studied very hard and learned all the stuff in the textbooks, but you don’t do well in the exam, who knows you knows the syllabus well?  Exam techniques helps you to boost your grade and make yourself more representable.  In fact, you are tested not only when you  apply for university, you will be tested if you want to enter grad school, become a professional, or get any kind of license or certificate.  Therefore, learning exam technique in early age is a good investment that will pay back handsomely in one’s lifetime.