Saturday, August 15, 2009

Taking Shortcuts; A Good Thing?


Do you ever take shortcut way while you are driving to some place. My guess is that most of you do it, especially in Jakarta where traffic crowded oftenly. Surely, taking shortcut make you consume less time and gasoline. Most of the shortcut is not a main street. It could be a narrow street in the middle of public housing.

When traffic on a main street often get crowd someone will attempt find a shortcut way. And then when they find a shortcut, at the begining it give some credit because they drive more efficient. But then, the information is spreading symetricly and more people are taking shortcut. In the end that shortcut way become crowded. And that crowded way will spread into the another main street. That is clearly not a Pareto-Improvement. You can find numbers of public housing street easily in Jakarta transformed into crowded shortcut street and became main source of traffic jam.

Experienced traffic jam is the consequences of driving. Most people don't realize that because they only see problem in narrower stand point despite think about what result to others. Taking shortcut won't reduce traffic jam because it's only transfer crowd to some other places.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Common Enemy For The World


This world today is a mess. People killing each other for various reasons. Afghanistan, Irak, Palestine, Somalia have been changed to killing field. High tension relationship between "nuclear country" is threatening the whole world. Is there any way to stop this war?

I recently saw Watchmen and have to say that it was a very good movie. In the edge of nuclear war between Soviet and United States which could destroy earth, Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), set up an ultimate plan to stop it. The plan is to destroy New York City with a super power energy. The goal is to deceive and make both country realize that there does exist other dangerous side which is stronger than them. One option left for them is to merge and united to face the common enemy together. In the end, peace prevail on earth.

A shortcut to make peace in this world is to create a common enemy, whatever it is. Common enemy leads to common purpose. Trying to convince this world about aliens existence, would be good way to unite this world.