Going Global

The real price of everything, what everything costs to the man who wants to acquire it is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. Whats everything id really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.

That was Adam Smith.

I have always been a fan of vadais, if you don’t know what a vadai is, then you've probably not hung around a lot of Sri Lankan trains, roadsides or bust stops much. They are small, made of dhal and flour, fried, crispy and can usually include a little piece of maldive fish or a prawn or two. The prawn variety is known as an isso vadai, isso meaning prawns, and are extremely popular around Galle Face, before it was shut down that is (by shut down i mean Galle Face, not the isso vadai industry har har).

Excuse me while I clear up my watering mouth. Now vadais are generally very popular in crowded areas and a pack of 5 small maldive fish vadais (back when I was schooling, which was not so long ago) cost about 10 bucks. you'd get some fried chilies to much along with them and iv always considered them to be a tasty treat.

What do vadais have in common with indices and the theory of value? I hear you ask. Well I’m getting there so please do be patient.

So recently I was in Ratnapura on a Saturday for a funeral. Bussed it there alone and when i got there what did I see? You guessed it! a chap selling vadai in a little cart. So i walked over and asked for a pack of 5 maldive fish vadais (generally a bit smaller than your average chicken egg) and i dig out my wallet expecting it to cost about 20 bucks (allowing for inflation) and guess what? chap asks me for 30.

Ok. well I guessed times were hard and the vadais did look pretty crisp. So I shelled it out. So that was a 300% increase in price over a period of oh say, 3 years or so.



Sounds like a good indicator of the real level of inflation in the country to me. Maybe the Central Bank should consider initiating a vadai index. Or maybe even a basket index of all roadside ‘fast-food’ items if correlation is as obvious as it is with the vadai. Maybe I should start an island wide campaign to generate awareness. This could be a start.

Life, is a salmon tin.

We are all living inside one. It is called Earth. Previously, us Sri Lankans were living in a smaller tin called Sri Lanka or Serendib/Thmbapanni or any of the other names we called our country. Fact was, the name of the island bore no real relevance, for then we fought and killed each other to our hearts content only identifying ourselves in terms of which highly divisive feudal kingdom we belonged to. All this, of course only until some bigger fish from another tin invaded our little tin. I believe they were of the Protugese variety.

And then the Dutch. followed by the British. Thats when the whole sense of a Sri Lankan identity came into being. And we fought as a nation to take back our little salmon tin. So did external influence play a part in bringing this about? sure seems like it.

This is a phenomenon that has taken place in every single nation of the world. We only fight over what we know exists. Back in those days we only possessed a hazy idea of the rest of the world in general and therefore couldn’t get our heads around the fact that there was anything really bigger than this island of ours. Same thing happened in India, same thing in the UK, same all over the world.

Individual nations have become larger and larger. As the smaller ones have been swallowed up. Ireland was one of the last to go, most of the pacific islands were snapped up in the last world war. So where do we go to next?

What if. What if some advance alien civilization invaded our dank atmosphere and made their presence felt? Would the ensuing economic and security implications make us finally get together under a banner of a united Earth?

Would we simply proceed to identify ourselves as “Earthlings’ instead of ‘Americans’ or ‘Chinese’ or ‘Sri Lankans’ etc? We would. As the universe reveals itself to us as a very much ‘real’ place all our petty bickering over this minute planet would die down and in good old bloodthirsty human fashion, we would proceed to pool our resources and steal whatever we can from the advanced aliens to launch our own ‘war against slime’ on some underdeveloped planet on a distant star system. We would all start fighting in the salmon tin of the Milky Way. And who knows how many eons later, if we ever do survive, or live to encounter a substantial external threat, maybe even the Great Salmon Tin of the Universe.

And then only the green skinned, big headed blokes with the funny antenna would be the bad guys. The rest of us can well, rest easy.

Babies are a-booming in the modern world. Especially across the western hemisphere, increasing numbers of couples are looking to adopt after exhausting all other methods of procuring offspring. Therefore ‘babies’ have blossomed into a full scale industry. Driven by the same demand that say, fertility clinics are driven by.


Supply of course is monopolized by fully legalized adoption agencies. And this works like any other market in the sense that there is a cost attached to adoption, mainly when it comes to fees. And there is also a prosperous bunch of intermediaries operating such as lawyers, counselors etc. But this is a highly regularized process and with supply unable to keep up with demand, a black market for baby trade has emerged and is prospering resulting in kidnappings and even blatant baby selling.

The incident that triggered this post happened in good old Ceylon. And we’re well-known to have a highly de-regularized baby trade market. We’ve been hearing about it for years. Ever since i was a kid, I remember it as being a part of popular culture, there were countless numbers of Singhalese tele-dramas I’ve watched that talked about how this baby was sold to (for e.g. a family in UK) and how the kid returns after long years of absence to a remote village in a sunny island etc to find its birth parents in a poor little house built of clay etc.

The point being that due to poverty and various other reasons like loose sexual habits among rural youth and the lack of reliable abortion options lot of babies were being born that were unwanted. Many of these babies were literally being treated as garbage with numerous incidents of unwanted offspring being found dumped by the sides of roads (apparently baskets and doorsteps are an alien concept over here) and even murdered.

As discussed, at the same time, there was burgeoning demand for babies in many Western states. In states where populations were on the decline and prosperity was on the rise, couples were increasingly looking choosing adoption as an option instead of giving birth or due to impotency.

So now we have the demand for babies as well as the supply of babies which are the main ingredients of any industry right? But much of the fees potential adopters have to pay (which sometimes number in the thousands, and I am talking hard currency) go to all the intermediaries and to adoption agencies. Poor parents will only have the satisfaction of knowing that that cuddly little bundle of love will have found a (hopefully) happy home.

But why does this have to be the case? Why can’t we make sure the baby gets a good place to grow up and make a buck at the same time? i guess most of them started to think that way and i think despite popular belief, rural Sri Lankans do have a grasp of market economics for this has been happening for quite some time. The latest going price seems to have been Rs. 66,000. But then again, that was a domestic sale. If it was a foreigner the price would undoubtedly have doubled (just like tuk tuk and bus fare and basically anything else a white skinned person tries to buy on our golden shores). Clever aren’t we?

But it’s not only here where this is happening; Africa is major supplier of babies, also countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam (just look at the celebrity list of adopters).

So why don’t they just de-regularize the whole thing and let babies be treated as just another export good? We could have separate baby commodity markets as well, maybe diversify our investment portfolios now that oil is on the drop, stock markets are crashing and even gold isn’t as reliable as it used to be. Hell, babies could end up saving the world from a Great Depression. And Friedman would be happy too. A free market should, after all, be a free market. What do you think?

So the All Island Lottery Dealers' Society (AILDS) is going to strike on Thursday and bring to a standstill one of the main contributors to the Sri Lankan economy is it? 35 million in revenues per day im told. taken at an average of 10 bucks a sweep ticket. thats 3.5 million sweep tickets sold per day and i suppose it would be safe to assume that approximately 3.5 million people buy those tickets (excluding the few who are more addicted and maybe blow a good proportion of their paycheck on them).

whats my point? well i dont really have one to tell you the truth, except to explore this whole business of sweep ticket selling and how it affects a country like ours. So lets see, the AILDB (The dealers netwok) says that they are currently only entitled to 1.5% of the revenues from a ticket and out of that, 1.35% goes to the sweep ticket seller. so out of 35 million thats about an average of Rs. 525,000 for the dealer network and about Rs.472,500 for the ticket sellers as a whole, per day.


Well do the math and consider the massive amounts of tickets sellers that the dealer network has an it is pretty apparent that they only make a pittance compared to the total revenue generated by the lotteries board. After the planned increase if ticket prices this might change and double their revenues. So that would probably keep them happy.

Meanwhile, the lottery board continues to contribute to the economy and infrastructure of the country and also dish out gazillions to the occasional jackpot winner. So that is the current set-up and it doesnt look like its going to change any time soon.
I wonder how much of these 'funds' are being absorbed by corruption though eh

k now here's some news. woke up early this morning and switched on Rupavahini to maybe catch a glimpse of the Olympics and there is apparently a 'Live' foreign news program going on at that forsaken hour. Who would watch Rupavahini for foreign news that early? well i suppose they must have some viewer segment somewhere that does it or they wouldn’t have it would they? I mean Rupavahini is the most sensible of all Sri Lankan stations right? er, Right?

Anyways i was up watching it but what’s with the Live gimmick? I mean surely just cos those poor presenters are coming all the way from home to be there at 6 am sharp to project yesterdays news live from the studio doesn’t warrant calling it Live?? i mean, where’s the consumer benefit from labeling the news Live? when the only things that are live are the slightly bleary eyed, overly bright presenters trying way too hard to look really cheerful and here's the stinky part, righteous.

So first there was a segment on the Spanish plane crash. Conflicting views. Tragic incident. over 150 people dead. Crazy the plane crashes we get these days. Then onto Georgia, and get this, they show the Russian point of view. I mean why not the US? are'nt we, or at least our giovernment, supposed to sucking upto Bush? and as the government's media machine isnt Rupavahini supposed to exemplify thise vews? So i was waiting for a couter argument. heavy with western views.. But it never came.

They talk about how the US is condemning the attacks but how Russia is defending them and paint the Russians in an innocent light claiming that their sovereignty was breached first. While technically that might be correct, the incidents that followed painted the Russians hands with a significant amount of blood that would IMHO, definitely warrant some mention from a media organization that values integrity and freedom of expression. Then they go on about the US attacking Panama and Iraq and so on and so forth and ask if those attacks were justifiable as a response to US bad talk with regard to the whole conflict. Those facts are not irrelevant and I support their sentiments. But you can’t use them as an excuse to carry out your own killings can you?

Did anyone notice how smoothly the US went ahead with their missile plan in Poland and Putin kept shut like little mouse? After all that big talk of 'we will not let you belittle us in our own region' etc etc? signs of a bit of a deal? bit of a 'if you turn the blind eye on our atrocity , we let you go ahead and build a missile defence center right next to us' sort of deal?

Then onto the presidential race of the US. Our national TV station states that the US media is highlighting the fact that McCain is ahead of the polls by 7% a little bit too much and (this is what cracked me up) Rupavahini says that 'the US media is famous for such propagandist activities that go against the nature of unbiased media'

So righteous. So disgusting. Audacious. But plain ridiculous if you ask me. Rupavahini can’t even fool the people properly. As a government propaganda machine, they absolutely suck.