Should we do investment?

Investment is a way to make money. In the past, we did not have any stock market, but investment still existed. Trading is also an investment. So whenever you put your money into a business, you are investing. But now, investment is commonly referring to trading in the financial market like stock market and foreign exchange market. As the world have been developed into a financial world, investment is very common. From the richest businessman in the world to the old lady living next to you are doing investment. However, since many people have lost much of their money in the market, especially during financial crisis, it makes many people afraid of investing. So should we still do investment? For me, I will. And I am going to convince you to join me in the market.

It is true that many people always lose money in the financial market. Even if they sometimes earn money, they will not be able to get any money from the market at the end. Some people had tried investing but lost much money and left the market, while some people heard about their friends’ experience and learnt the lesson not to try investing. So it is reasonable that people refuse to put money in such an unsafe place.

Nevertheless, all these are because many people do not really understand what investment is. In fact, they are not doing investment but gambling. They do not know what they are investing; they just follow others or observe the trend. There is no doubt about losing money by using such strategy. Investing in the financial market is mainly putting money in different firms. We should pay some effort to learn about the business you are investing. We should also notice all the news about the market and the entire economy. Investing is not only by luck, but by studying them. These are what we suppose to do with investment.

If people really know how to invest, they will probably not lose money all the time. By studying your investment and with your experience, you will know why this stock drops and why that stock rises, thus you can make the best response but not just wait there. I cannot guarantee that you can surely earn money, but at least you will learn how to minimize the loss and maximize the profit.

I know there will always be some risks in investing. You cannot determine everything, accidents always happen! So I think it is better not to put all of your money in the market. I will prefer you to invest only your spare money minus some reserve for your future needs, which means even if you lose all your money in the market, you can still live normally for one to two years. Otherwise, if a catastrophic financial crisis happens, you will suddenly lose a relatively large amount of money. And if you even lose your job at the same time because of the poor economy, you will have difficulties and feel hard to live with no income. It is a really bad situation which no one wants to experience.

I know there are some people who are not good at investing or studying them. I will not recommend you to invest a lot, but you can still invest some in some riskless financial assets. It is far better than just put money into the banks, since the interest rate is extremely low which is nearly zero. We should anyway do some investment to compensate inflation and to prepare for our future lives. Thus I strongly advise you to do investment, but in a smart way.

Big Brother Is Watching You

National security is always a very important issue in a country, as you may lose part of or even the whole country if you do not pay attention on it. Especially after the 911 accident, all countries on the earth learnt the lesson and had put more attention on their national security to prevent another disastrous terrorist attack. In order to maintain the security, freedom is to be sacrificed. Governments have to keep eyes on everyone and everywhere. For example, they have to install CCTVs at many important places; they have to check our bodies and our belongings when we go to some area. We lose part of our freedom but we get the safety as an exchange. Is it good or bad about these actions?

On one side, the new security measures are protecting our lives, just like what the army and police are doing normally. They can keep us safe by keeping us away from terrorists. We can live safely and do not have to worry about any danger will come to us.

On the other side, those new security measures take away our freedom. Freedom is one of the rights we should have as a human. No one should have the power to take it away from us. There are many examples like whenever some laws which against our freedom are introduced by governments or councilors, many associations and parties will stand up and speak out loud to fight against the corresponding laws.

In my opinion, it is more good than bad in this issue. For those who disagree, I want to ask you what the governments can do to protect us while keeping the freedom for us. At least those famous politicians and government officials cannot answer it. So I can say freedom and safety cannot exist together in this case, and it becomes a dichotomy. Here comes a question: what should we choose between freedom and safety? I think the answer would be obvious. Assuming that we are not radical liberalists, we should surely choose safety. Our lives should be the first thing that we have to consider, because we can do nothing and have nothing without our lives. Moreover, the peace brought by the security measures is also very important to us. You can imagine if you have everything but without peace in your heart, it would be rather worse than the case if you have nothing but with peace. So I think peace is more important than anything including freedom. Thus, I agree to sacrifice our freedom to exchange for our valuable lives and irreplaceable peace.

Grades

In Hong Kong, children receive grades starting from kindergarten; that means they receive grades since their very first year of study. Grades are given to them when they do not really understand what they are doing. You can imagine that comparison among them will be made by their teachers and parents. And their parents will tell their children to work hard to get a better result in order to beat other pupils. Comparing to the education system in most European countries, you may think it is not a good atmosphere for kids to study, but that is how I grew up. As I grew up in such atmosphere, I did not know there are other kinds of education system that do not have grades in primary school before. After I knew that and I heard some people believe that it is not good for children to receive grades so early, I started to compare them in my mind. However, by my personal study experience under such atmosphere, I think grading earlier helped me to learn better. Therefore, I am going to argue for the grading of children in primary school.

I can imagine how the atmosphere is in primary schools without grades. Pupils can learn without pressure and enjoy their study lives. As a student, I would prefer it rather than receiving grades from my academic performance. The main reason is not that it is too young for us to sustain pressure but it is because we are lazy and we do not like to revise. However, you know these hidden reasons are not proper. Government should not fulfill these children’s demand as you would not cancel the homework system just because children hate to do homework. I think they are just similar. To comment it objectively, I think it is better for primary school kids to receive grades.

Without giving grades to children, they will probably study happily but also passively. I was also a pupil in primary school long time ago, so I understand how they think. If I have nothing to care about my study and at the same time I can choose to play, I would just leave my study after class and enjoy playing all the time. I will not spend time on doing homework or revising textbooks. Therefore, I think they will not take homework seriously and will not pay attention to what they learn. The reason why the result will be different from what government think is that children are too young and not so sensible. For little kids, they are not mature enough to determine their act, thus they will simply choose what favour them, but sadly it is not study.

On the contrary, children may be under pressure with their grades, but I think the pressure can be counted as an impulse or a motive force to encourage them to study harder. Someone will think competition and comparison among children are not healthy, but I can tell from my experience that these can really encourage them to pay more effort to learn and revise. After all, we can actually gain from them. It is just like a writing competition with prize and one without prize, children will probably perform better in the one with prize because they need some encouragement. But they can hardly get any encouragement if they do not receive any grade from their academic performance.

In conclusion, I think there are far more advantages than disadvantages to give grades to children in primary school. Maybe children will not like this policy as I mentioned above, but they will surely gain from it. They will know it later when they grow up like me. To let children to learn better, faster and more efficiently, I definitely support to give grades to children in primary school.

Climate Change

Climate change has been one of the biggest issues in the world for decades. These years, you can really feel the climate changing. You can observe winter become colder and colder in the US and Europe; at the same time winter is nearly disappeared in some area like South Asia. Everyone should have been aware of the problem about climate change. No one should say he/she does not know what it is. Even a kid knows the word “global warming”. However, the situation was not improved but even worsened. A simple deduction is that people just ignore it!

It is now 21st century and we are in a modern world. Electricity is essential to everyone. Computers, which need electricity in order to work, are everywhere and they play vital parts of the world. It seems we cannot live without electricity, which you can see from a power failure. And it is true in some way, without electricity, we will not die immediately, but the whole world will surely collapse. In such a modern world, there is always an increasing demand of electricity and an increasing use of cars, ships and planes. As it needs fuel like coal and oil to produce electricity, there is no difference between using electricity and burning fuel. As a result, we are producing more and more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide by burning more and more fuel. It is the result when we just ignore the problem of global warming and do nothing about it, which is what most people are doing now.

Why do people ignore such a big problem which will damage our dear planet Earth? A simple reason is that many people are selfish. They do not care what will happen fifty years later. They do not even think about how their offspring could live on such a polluted and dying earth. They just enjoy their lives today. They enjoy using all the technology products like television, computers and mobile phones. They abuse using and wasting fuel, papers, plastics and many other resources because they think they did pay for them and they can do anything they want. They also feel it is stupid if they do not enjoy what they have now but give up all the things to save the environment.

Another reason is that they are lazy. They feel it is too inconvenient to recycle materials and save the use of resources. And they always forget to turn off lights and switch off electric appliances when they do not need them. They also use all kinds of disposables. All of these behaviors are because of convenience, and also laziness. They can help the environment but they just do not want to help.

Therefore, I think people have already realized the problem of global warming, but they just ignore it with several reasons mentioned above. However, to be honest, it is hard to do so much to help the environment in reality. For example, when you have lunch in a fast-food shop, you will probably not bring with your own forks and knifes. And you cannot just move to a forest and live there to reduce using electricity and fuel. But it does not mean that we can just do nothing towards this problem. We should try our very best to do every tiny work to save the earth. Maybe you will think it is too little and it does not help much to save the whole earth. However, if all of us can really do these tiny works, then it would be a huge help and we can save the earth!

The Fascination of a TV series

In Hong Kong, people love watching TV very much. I think people have started to be addicted to it since the first Hong Kong free television broadcaster was launched in 1960s. After that, watching TV has become an important part of all Hong Kong people’s everyday lives.

Since Hong Kong is a small city and we were not part of China before 1997, we only have two local free television broadcasters. Each of them provides two channels, one in Chinese and one in English. Comparing to other cities or countries, we do not have many choices. But maybe it is the reason that the channels we have are mixed with different programs. That is enough for us already; at least most of us enjoy watching them.

American TV series are increasingly popular these years in Hong Kong. They are showing in the two English channels. However, more Hong Kong people like to watch the local TV series than the American ones. There are several reasons. First, some of Hong Kong people (especially old people) do not know English well; they surely like watching Chinese TV series more. Second, the local TV series will be based on our own culture and background (Chinese or Hong Kong), people feel more familiar to them. Moreover, local TV series show every Monday to Friday, and we usually have three of them showing in one channel at one night. Furthermore, unlike the American TV series, we would not show them only once a week but almost every day. People can always talk about them during the day every day. Therefore we can get addicted to them very easily. There is one more difference between American and local TV series, our TV series usually end in a few months (because they show five times a week), it makes people easier to follow and they can shift to a new one very soon in case they do not like it.

I like many of those local TV series, but my recent favourite series is a modern action series called “Emergency Unit”. It is direct sequel to two popular TV series in 2005 and 2007. It is about two undercover agents for the police force trying to expose a triad boss’s crimes. It is a little bit similar to the famous movie “The Departed”. People really like this TV series and it became popular very soon. And the actor who takes the role as one of the undercover agents had a great performance in this series; nearly all people in Hong Kong love him. I also love him as they do. I think he is a good actor and he acts really great all the time but not only in this series. But in my opinion, the main reason makes him so famous is that his character is a excellent policeman but being sent to be an undercover in a triad society for ten years and died finally without resuming his post. We sympathize with his life; and I think that’s why we love him. When his character died in the show, it caused a loud noise and many people felt sad about it. It became a hot issue in Hong Kong for a while, and it attracted more people to watch this TV series. I cannot stop watching this series even I was in Sweden, so I kept watching the online broadcasting every day in last few months.

“Emergency Unit” is a great TV series, and it is not only popular in Hong Kong. Many Chinese people around the world love watching it too. They were discussing about it online every day when the series is still showing. You can see how powerful the Hong Kong local TV series are. I can say American TV series are not much better than our local ones. And that’s why I love them and watch them every day.

Childhood Memories

I was born in the late nineteen eighties and grew up in nineteen nineties. At that time, the computer technology was just at its beginning stage, there were TV games and computer games, but not as common as now. At least we would not sit in front of the computers and play with them all the time. In fact, my elder sister and I only got our first computer when I was eleven or twelve, and the major function of it is for doing homework. We had lived in a different world compared to the kids now; we had a much bigger and wider world than they do!

Instead of playing computers, we spent our time in wide variety of activities. In Hong Kong, we live in tall buildings rather than in houses, maybe it is the reason why most of the time children are not allowed to leave their homes. This phenomenon does not change until now. We spent most of our leisure time at home but during that time we could still enjoy ourselves in a small room without computers. Besides watching TV, we also played games together with our siblings. Not only those board games like Monopoly or UNO we would play, but also some games we invented on our own. We could enjoy a whole day simply playing with some handmade paper swords or paper guns. Even if I was alone sometimes, I could also play happily with Lego and making up stories with them.

Sometimes we went to the park next to our home; you can always find a park nearby in Hong Kong. We could play sports like basketball, badminton and so on. We could also play on the swings and slides in the playground there. But more than these, we would join with other boys and girls there to play some group games. There were often more than twenty of us because many parents brought their children out to playground too! We played hide-and-seek and many other interesting games together. We ran and jumped, laughed and screamed. The time there was really fun! However, I no longer see this scene in any park anymore now. Children don’t like to go to parks anymore; they only go there with their parents when they are small. Some of them may still go to the park, but they just “play” with other kids with their PSPs or Nintendo DSs! The purpose of parks and playgrounds seems to be fading as time passes.

Of course we had thousands of games we can play at home and in the park, but I cannot write them all here. What I want to say is that computer games are not the only games in the world now, children should not play with them all the time. They play ball games in computers virtually, why don’t they just go to the court to play the real one? Children are supposed to be active; they should running and jumping all day. I really wonder if their fitness is still fine by just exercising with their fingers only. It is not healthy to them! Moreover, they cannot learn the communication skill and they don’t know how to co-operate each other, which we learnt from playing group games unconsciously.

In my opinion, the most important thing for a child is their happiness, in condition that things are good to him or her. Maybe children can also enjoy their time now and feel very happy to play with their computer games, yet it is not healthy to them. I am not telling all parents to throw away their kids’ computer games and tell their children to live without them just like what the children did twenty years ago, but they should control the time their kids spend on them. Parents should also encourage children to go out to play with friends in the park, so that they can do some exercise and breathe in some flesh air there. Furthermore, they should buy or make some games (maybe those they played when they were small) for their kids, spend more time with them and play with them. Then children would not spend all of their time with computers again. Finally they will be able to see the big and wonderful world which they could not see before.