Jan 16, 2009

After watching Hancock.

Today I watched HanCock. Unfortunately it was not as interesting as I expected. They may consider to make its part two, but I don't get the whole story completely, especially what the woman said.
First of all, the actor of Hancock is not appropriate. I think if the actor looked less hansom, it fits better. Will Smite is too hansom for the role.

Second, the actions in the movie is too brutal. It is too simple and not so much fun.

It is just fine if I take it as just a simple action movie, but the story is too messy, and I expected higher.

Jan 15, 2009

How to decide value of goods: customers vs producers

These days how can we know which items are good and which one is bad?
Most of cases we are affected by advertisements via mess medias such as TV or newspapers.

It is reasonable to say that the items that spend expensive advertisement cost are probably valuable. Because if the producers are not so much confident for their items, they would not spend that much costs.

I think cars are good examples for that. Most of people don't have enough knowledge for details of cars. We rely on their reputations which is built up by advertisements, or more simply rely on their price tags.

However, it doesn't always work. A good example is some of advertisements in mess medias in order to cover their shortcomings. In Korea most of big companies purchase big advertisements whenever they attack union activities. They pay their money to mess media themselves in order to control the articles of the media.

Those information from advertisements are all from producers not from customers. Producers value their own items, which seems weird in some sense.

In contrast, there are several ways to spread information for some items from customers not from producers. A good example for this is probably Google.

How could Google prevailed Yahoo. It is certainly because of the quality of searching results. Yahoo showed searching results, with ranking each URL by how much the owners of the URL payed to Yahoo, while Google showed searching results, with ranking each URL by how many other web sites linked the URL. I think the prior way relies on the information from producers, as I mentioned earlier, and the latter way does with the information from customers.

Many of economists believed in the story that "price" indicates where resources should go to; in other word the price embraces information to go. However, it cannot explain the difference between Yahoo and Google. The searching results of Yahoo are, of course, evaluated by "the price" either.

I like to conclude that we need to see where the information for the price came from. I agree that "the price" is a good way to evaluate how much a item is valuable. However when we see the source of the price information, it may vary from certain numbers of producers only to countless customers. Furthermore, the information can appear without any price tag, as we have seen in Google and some of protests.

*PS: This article is influenced by a Ted movie clip: Open source economics.

Jan 14, 2009

WalMart the high cost of low price.

This is a brief summary of the movie, "WalMart the high cost of low price".


1. Many many employees in Wal-Mart had to rely on Medicaid, which is federal health insurance. It is because Wal-Mart doesn't provide health care for their employee.

2. Wal-Mart doesn't allow people to have union. They attack and distroy any attempting of unionizing.

3. The average payment in Wal-Mart is $10.78 per hour, but the starting pay can be far lower, which can be below the poverty line. The average Wal-Mart Hourly sales employee wages is $13,861, while the federal poverty level family of four is $17.650.

4. Wal-Mart had legal conflicting of cheating for over time working payment in 32 different states.

5. WalMart comes to local and many of family business had to be closed. And states help them to build roads and parking facilities, which is unfair to local competes. Moreover WalMart receives lots of subsidy from states, which had assigned to other facilities such as school and fire department.

6. The WalMart factory in China charges employee for dormitory even when they move out. The environment in the dormitory is unpleasant: very warm in summer, and very narrow. WalMart cheat for employee's working hour as well as they do in america.

7. The employee in India works from 8am to 10pm, which is 14 hours a day. Other companies in India follows the standard that WalMart do, and WalMart suck down every standards in India.

8. There is no security camera or anything in parking lots of WalMart. WalMart is aware that more than 80% of crimes happen in their own parking lots. While there are lots of security camera inside of WalMart, outside of WalMart there is nothing. Even when there are some of security camera for outside, nobody watches the camera.


From my individual experience, WalMart was the most boring and inactive place in america. I don't understand why WalMart is so popular.

I don't think WalMart is symbol of evil. They are just following money. It is just one face of capitalism. Any of company where humanity lost on money will have this kind of face.

Jan 12, 2009

Free movie tutorials for 3D-Max and Maya - 3D Buzz

I have found lots of good free moive tutorials in a web site, 3DBuzz.
The web site has more than 100 hours tutorial movie clips for 3D Max and Maya.
These days I'm studying 3D Max first, and I plan to study Maya as well.