Foreign Perspectives

Archive for March, 2008

Normally people move from savings to investment but draw the line at risky investments and don’t consider gambling as being in the same continum.

But it is. Certainly savings and gambling are very much at the extreme ends of that continum but some high risk investments aren’t nearly so far from gambling as the investment community in general would have you believe.

Is it any more risky to put £1 on a horse or to put £1 on a penny share? Well, sure, it’s usually riskier to put it on a horse BUT remember that whilst you might put £1 on a horse, chances are it would be more like £1000 that you’d be putting on that penny share which is a whole lot more to lose.

Of course, that difference in the amount of money involved is critical in how you should rate a gamble as compared to a very high risk investment. However, don’t forget that even the safest investments are also gambles as any investor in Northern Rock will tell you now or for that matter policy holders in what was the even more solid Equitable Life.

Although the big names are always present, there seems to be an almost constant launching of new sites offering sponsored post opportunities these days.

This is brilliant in the sense that nearly all of them give you one post to do about themselves for an above average sum. Typically you’ll get $10 to write a post of a few hundred words about the sponsored listings site but I’ve had as high as $55.

In several cases, that has been the only post that I’ve written for a site. That’s not because I’m totally mercenary and take only the payment to write about them and then ignore them, but because several of the sites have never had another opportunity available for me to write about. OK, eventually perhaps some of them might do, but realistically I’m not going to continue to look at a site that never has anything for me when I can spend that time looking at other sites which do provide a stream of opportunities.

The e-mail sites are very hard to judge on this score. They tend not to ask you to write about them but offer you a trial post to do. In one case, I picked up $75 from such a site and I’ve never heard from them again. I can live with that in that I have $75 in my bank account which wouldn’t otherwise have been there but I wonder what happened to them.

Are there getting to be just too many such sites around for the amount of advertising that they can collectively deliver?

Sometimes I wonder whether or not it’s worthwhile even attempting to learn another language if you’re a native English speaker.

After all, around Europe it’s commonplace to find that companies choose their working language as English. That doesn’t mean that they suddenly revert to some other language when chatting over lunch: it’s English all of the time in many of these companies.

In the European administration there is little option but to choose English as it’s the one language that can be counted on to be known by everyone as, outside the UK and Ireland, it’s almost always the first second language that people learn.

So in many cases you can get away with only English.

The other problem though is that as a native speaker of English it’s often difficult to get the chance to try out any other languages that you speak as throughout the world people tend to go to English straight away unless you speak their language at a very proficient level. That, of course, means that many English speakers just give up.

One big misunderstanding that many people have is that global warming means that everywhere will get warmer.

Let’s face it, if it were the case that everywhere would get a couple of degrees warmer then many people would be OK about some low lying areas of the world disappearing under water.

Except, of course, it isn’t quite like that. That couple of extra degrees not only raises sea levels but it also changes weather patterns. Areas that might formally have been great spots for growing crops could easily become deserts and vice versa. Plus there’s the not insignificant matter that weather could also become more extreme: perhaps the flooding that we’ve seen in several world regions in recent years is a forerunner of that.

Everyone stretches the truth to some extent on job applications and, of course, the employers know that and allow for it.

But, what if you stretched it so much that you started writing that you could do X when in reality you couldn’t quite do it?

Obviously, it’s one of those situations where “it depends” is the only possible answer. Clearly it’s going to be a problem if X is absolutely key to doing the job but probably it’s a pretty minor thing if X falls into the category of “we thought we’d ask for somebody that could do X but don’t really expect to get someone who can”.

Naturally too the requirements of some jobs aren’t possible. I’ve seen the equivalent of “must have 40 years Unix experience” when Unix wasn’t around 40 years ago so nobody can fulfil that. Actually, it’s surprisingly common to see that kind of requirement in technical jobs (see http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080229.html and http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080301.html).