I moved to Singapore in August, over 3 months ago as part of the internet startup I am a co-founder of: iSyndica. Having spent 6 months in Singapore the year before, I had been accustomed to most elements of the city: the humidity, the food diversity (though I do call Subway my home about half of the week) and the culture. I had heard of great schools, NUS, NTU and SMU, among others. What I had not been prepared for, is the labor market that Singapore would subject our startup to.

The graph above highlights the type of profile iSyndica would like to hire given the current state we are in: early stage startup – less than 12 months old. We want someone who is entrepreneurial because we are all constrained by time, and talented so that he can be productive. A tradeoff of these two can be allowed since an entrepreneurial spirit can be guided, and a talented individual can be trusted to do a proper job. The issue is that in Singapore, there are market dynamics that affect the availability of the three desirable profiles, leaving tech companies in Singapore with an overwhelming, yet undercapacitated, supply of lower quadrant people.

First crunch: The right side of the graph, the group of talented people will seek to go to the US. This is the mecca for computer scientists, startup or not.

Second crunch: Asians are notoriously risk averse and tend to favor brands: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Avaya and the likes all offer CV validation, a steady paycheck and the comfort that one is on the right track.

Third crunch: Singapore has made the news in the US and Europe as providing a large amount of startup capital to young upstarts. This has made available a flurry of grants of $50,000SGD to a number of fresh graduates  (or still in school) students with no experience to build and launch a product to market. Empirically, Singapore hasn’t had any global tech startups (ignoring the surprising story of Creative). Social Wok and Home Camera might be considered an exception (and where started by experienced individuals) given the overwhelming amount of individuals I’ve seen with their “Founders” or “Directors” business cards of companies. This easy access to funding has diluted the labor market for entrepreneurial people among small projects of 1-2 people.

Fourth crunch: We get money now what? Singapore’s great at providing money. I could be criticized for biting the hands that will feed me but I think my arguments are valid. Singapore is an island of 4 million populated in large parts by foreigners. If I am a Singaporean who has grown on the island, how do I understand how a consumer in the US or Europe (some of the bigger markets) perceives and uses internet services? I don’t. There’s no entry point into the mindset of your target audience, restricting your vision of the world to a smaller Southeast Asian subset.

Macro: Now with the rise of India and China as ecommerce and eservices consumer, Singapore could become a great hub. English-speaking, expat-friendly and politically stable. No, Singapore is too expensive and the labor isn’t there. China is boosting copycats of Youtube, facebook and google with the ferocity of the USSR government during the cold war. And geographically, it isn’t too great either. Being close to the equator means that distances to Europe, the US and China are still there. Over 6 hours to Beijing, 3.5 to Hong Kong, 24 hours to New York on a good day and 12 hours to Paris. I would pick Shanghai possibly as a better base. China has an overwhelming supply of graduates and they are aggressively pushing an R&D capability in computer software and hardware.

Little details: Being US-centric, most our customers and “partners” are in the US. With a 12 hour (13 during DST) time difference with the East Coast, it makes phone conversation, support emails and cold calling very difficult. For a while, one of my team member would be up all night responding to various issues.

Closing Remarks: Let it be noted that there are two dimensions that are important in my above analysis. The first one is that it concerns computer scientists and might not apply to other fields such as biotechnology. Second, Asia is more mobile oriented, which has driven a focus to Java based languages. iSyndica uses C#, .Net and MsSQL which are Microsoft supported technologies which might not be as readily available.

Despite the negatives, Singapore is a good place for Westerners to develop an idea – not develop a business. It is cheap for a developed country, the ease of living provides a nice balance to the toughness of a startup schedule, and getting a business incorporated is fairly easy. We were able to find a talented Chinese software engineer from NTU, giving us hope that we can bring more on board. However, we have begun looking more seriously at neighboring countries for help: India to begin with and probably China. Singapore for me is a bust.

Anecdotes: A friend who did some recruitment while at Motorola a few years ago complained that 80% of the candidates they interviewed couldn’t code a program in C to determine if a number was odd or even. Another friend working for Avaya similarly complained of recruiting difficulties.

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My life has put me in a interesting enough position where I think I can try to blend my personal experience with the issues I have enjoyed talking about on this blog. Today, I want to talk about my personal experience moving to Singapore. At this stage in my life I have lived and worked in France, USA and now Singapore. This has lead me to experience different cultures, both social and professional. Another element, is the bureaucracy of those countries and how they’ve made my life more or less easier.

Let’s go back to where it started, my welcoming home country: I have named France! Putting aside the irritation we display at non-French speaking tourists and our hatred of other countries’ subsidies when we gently fill our farmers’ pockets with EU money, it has a few positive elements:
- France is neighbor to many countries and small enough that you always have to think “international” when doing business. Very few new companies will have the ability to generate billions out of France alone and speaking a second or third language is a given.
- Having a lot of holidays gives you an incentive to work hard, because at the end of the year you know you’ll have the time to relax. You don’t spend your time carefully protecting that little allowance that is your 10 days of annual paid leave.
- Healthcare: Well, the good side is you don’t pay a lot for it. There’s a bad side to it.

I tend to complain most of my time (French heritage), so I’ll move on the negative:
- Visas are a hassle for foreigners. Two Indian women in my entourage had to jump through several hoops to work in France. One had to go through an international consulting company and the other one had to give up being paid because the project would have been over by the time her Visa would have been approved (something like 6 months. Does anyone know how to carry paper in French offices?). She ended up working for nothing.
- Work ethics are terrible. Labor laws don’t help. There’s a constant divide between management and employees. Many people will expand more effort avoiding work than actually getting it done. It’s sad but true. Luckily many private sector companies have sustained a virtuous circle by having adopted US work cultures (i-banks and consulting companies)
- High taxes, painful labor laws and limited government support make entrepreneurship an unpleasant experience.

The US in contrast has an amazing work culture. It is easy to find companies at the different levels: Fortune 500, small regional player, private companies or early startups. People know why they are getting paid and don’t take a paycheck for granted.
- The market is great. Launching a product in the US gives direct access to 250M consumers in the largest economy in the world. Even more so when you consider online businesses where critical mass in the US can be a determining international success factor.
- Labor laws are aligned with the mantra that you “earn your paycheck”. There are a good deal of laws to avoid discrimination and protect employees from abusive employers (though there are always tug-of-war stories out there).
- Creating a company incorporated in Delaware costs less than $500 and can be done online.
- Life is pretty good there and when you’re done working, the shops are still open (try to go grocery shopping in France on a Sunday when you’re not living in Paris).

Negatives:
- Visas is my number one. It’s been talked about and rehashed, particularly in the midst of this recession. The legal work required to get someone approved is time consuming and expensive. $4k is a typical pricetag, and the window of opportunity is small. If you are an entrepreneur there are some options, but if you are a founder looking to bring the rest of your team, the H1 Visas won’t allow them in until October. This is also assuming that the quota hasn’t been reached (which in 2007 it did in a day).
- Being a big market makes it easy to forget that there is a world outside. It’s important to know that threat/opportunities can be domestic but also international.
- Health care is expensive. But US healthcare needs no introduction…millionaire doctors and a horrible system with incentives in all the wrong places.

This leads us to Singapore. I think Singapore deserves praise for a lot of things. The weather is not one of them (I find it too humid).
- It took me less than a month to get an employment pass
- Opening a bank account took me 1 hour and just a passport (and the good grace of a bank employee)
- Creating a company is more expensive than in the US but still reasonable in terms of costs (around $1k)
- Life is easy, public transportation great and cost of living affordable at basic levels (you need to adjust to local food, which on a day to day basis can become hard)
- Shops are open 7 days a week. You can eat, shop and live late (the gyms close a little early in my opinion).

Some issues arise around finding the right labor. Joi Ito said at a recent talk that Asians are a bit risk averse. This means they’ll buy high…then realize they overpaid, panic and sell low. The same with employees, they all want to work for Google, Yahoo and other brand names. A startup that might just be the next Google will not attract them. This has made it hard for iSyndica, the startup I’m a co-founder of, to find developers.

The bandwidth in Singapore is AWFUL! This is a specific issue that wouldn’t be one to many of you. As an internet startup, it ranks pretty high on our basic needs and we’ve all been accustomed to US and European bandwidth levels. Singapore can claim it has 100Mbps all over the island, it counts for nothing when you reach the US through an undersized backbone pipe going through Taiwan.

One very fascinating aspect, yet not too surprising given its notorious brand, is the ubiquity of coke. In a country were getting flour, or even bread is challenging, one can always get a coke, or a fanta. Commanding equally high praises is Unilever, which sells everything from food staples, like oil and margarine, to health and beauty products, like soap and toothpaste. I will take a small step back to explain first the challenges these companies face.

Ghana was originally called the Gold Coast, for the country’s rich gold ressources. But as it’s name implies, the coast is gold. In general, the big West African capitals are located on the coasts, and as such the economic activity as well. In Ghana, the capital is Accra; if you wander in Osu, the definitely westernized neighborhood, you will see a dynamic and promising side of Ghana, showing it can keep up with the rest of the world. The nice cars, the foreign embassies and the brand new buildings are a testament of the changes that are taking place in this beautiful country. However, drive up north, toward the Volta region, then further up toward Tamale and the Burkina Faso border, and things become eerily similar to those dazzling pictures of African villages we have all seen growing up; the dirt roads, the straw roofs and simple houses. In the villages off the main roads, you get your water from streams, you may or may not have electricity and life is definitely more laid back and simple. It takes special operational skills to bring ice cream to the masses or 50 kg bags of flour in a remote village: take one dirt road in a mini-van for a few hours ride and it will become as obvious as gravity.

In that complex setting, where infrastructures are lacking, a second challenge is the fragmentation of the market. When I first arrived in Accra, I was seeing small shops, tended by one old lady, or some tired looking man. They would be selling phone units, or stacks of Unilever food products in a space not bigger than 4 square meters (that’s 43 square feet for those living in the new world). I kept looking for stores and maybe super markets, but I never saw them. That’s when I realized that those small retail spaces were the core distribution channel of Ghana. You have in essence a highly fragmented retail space where one individual will sell 3 or 4 bars of soap vs. his competitor 20 meters down who will sell 2. From a manufacturer’s point of view, such as Coke, this means that no single buyer will have any leverage or consolidation power. However, there are lots of buyers, and if you multiply lots of buyers by any amount, it starts to become a large number.

What Coke and Unilever have understood, is that you do not need to create complex distribution networks and deliver the product in the hands of those who will sell them. There are too many. However, the economics are such that the people need products, and there are people that need products to sell, to survive and generate income. All Coke and Unilever need to do is to bring the product to the main areas and people will then buy the box of soap or the crate of coke and worry about getting that to their village where they will sell it. In Ho, the larger city in my area (for me it was a 1 hour ride on a tro-tro, a mini-van filled with people, 30 minutes on a regular road and another 30 minutes on a dirt road that could have been borrowed from a monster truck track), there is a spot known as “Coca Cola” set at a busy intersection. Crates of sprite and fantas move one at a time through the door of a simple concrete construction, sometimes more when a person is lucky enough to have a car or large pick-up truck. Similarly, Unilever has a large distribution center. Do they worry about the product getting to the village I was in? The answer is they don’t need to. The people will do it for them.

Upon sharing my observation with my sister, she mentioned a case study she studied at INSEAD. It was about the penetration of Unilever in the Indian market, and in general the success of Unilever at penetrating developing countries, because it understands the system. It understood how the economy relied on mom & pop shops that look no bigger or nicer than a 10 year old’s lemonade stand in the US (obviously, I am exagerating here but you get the point). It is a pyramid distribution system where people closer to the source will resell to people further removed, who in turn will sell to people further removed, bringing the product deeper and deeper into the country. Unilever deserves recognition, in that this commercial success has enabled the presence of products like soaps and toothpaste in villages, driving hygienic improvements and standards of living. When I arrived in my village, I was surprised at the amount of products that were available. It wasn’t a grocery store aisle, but it was something. And something is always better than nothing at all.

Several algorithms exist to improve Hard Drive scheduling programs, some listed on the following page including FCFS (first come first served). This means that if I click the elevator button, whichever one is free will come to me first; or C-LOOK where if I click on the elevator button, I will be picked up by an elevator moving in my direction (if I desire to go in the same direction) but someone else might be on it.

Differences between elevators and hard drives are however sufficiently different that in the end approaches differ. First, more assumptions can be made about elevators, based on time of day and floor layouts, and purpose. For example, an elevator going up, most likely picked up someone on the ground floor. And most people going down, go down to that same ground floor. Also, a lobby typically has several elevators working in concert to deliver the best transportation experience to office workers eager to get to their desk, or get the “hell out” of there. For example, you might want to keep elevators in between floors during the day, but most of them at the bottom during the morning rush.

In the end, my personal observations have led me to understand the following about my office elevators.

• Closing the door button doesn’t help nor does snapping at the same floor button like a madman improve your odds of things going faster.
• On the other hand, pressing buttons for several floors above you does (you could below as well, but that would just lengthen your trip). My thinking is that the elevator is tricked into believing it is transporting more people., and gets the signal that it should be moving to avoid making too many people wait (one person can wait).
• When two elevators are at the ground floor, you want to use the one that came second. The reason is that the first one was dispatched to the ground floor for the purpose of picking up people while the second brought people down and is bound to be dispatched back up (unless someone already hit the up button in the first elevator). Therefore the scheduling algorithm hasn’t assigned that elevator to pick people on the ground floor and will go to higher floors once the door close. And if someone steps in, it will close sooner, because the algorithm has another elevator on the ground floor to pick people up.
• The elevator on the ground floor closes the doors when you’ve either waited a long enough time, or another elevator is on its way down to pick people up. Either way, pressing the closing door button, doesn’t affect that.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. I wait for the elevator like everyone else, and ten or more seconds on my ride up or down, shouldn’t be that big of a deal. It is more important in my opinion to minimize how many miles an elevator travels a day, because that reduces the amount of energy used (which I believe my office elevators do to a certain extent), a much more valuable resource than 10 seconds of my time. In the meantime, I’ll keep on using stairs whenever I can, and I welcome my 18th floor stairclimb to my apartment every night.

- Market fundamentals do not support current oil futures prices according to OPEC (hints at speculation)
- the US economy has pushed financial entities to use oil to hedge themselves against inflation (supports “speculation”….though hedging is a different matter) which I wish my company had done (I wonder why we even have a CFO)
- However global inventories are apparently declining (supporting the supply/demand concept and hinting that more supply would give oil futures some slack)
- Bush complains to Arab countries that they are making it difficult for Americans to go to work, live etc. – the same man that claims that the war’s $3 trillion cost has nothing to do with the declining economy quoted as saying “I don’t think so (the war hurting the economy). I think, actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs.” …..MIGHT HELP? Great way to support your words Mr. President. Has this man looked at the latest data on employement? Has he also taken the time to assess the amount of extra fuel required to run the army in Iraq? I hope he takes the time to read The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes

My company arbitrages inefficiencies in the supply chain and splits savings with our customers/partners. However, unlike the market, a purchasing contract isn’t a fluid contract. Buyers for foodservice companies will work with suppliers, usually once or twice a year, and work on contracts that define everything from product costs to transportation allowances if the customer desires to pick up its products – product deliveries tend to be income shelter for food manufacturers like Pepsi, Kraft and Marcal Paper; however some are very fair – we work partly with those numbers to identify areas where we can transport goods for cheaper, but those numbers aren’t as dynamic as the fuel prices are. The outcome is that when fuel changes on a weekly basis on our side through our carrier costs, our revenue doesn’t. It may not change for a whole year. The result is a dramatic margin squeeze. This makes work challenging but I don’t really think I would want it any other way.

There are two things that have popped up from this situation. The first one is that my company has educated its customers into putting language in contracts that creates a more dynamic fuel scale that follows the industry “fuel surcharge” standard (the carrier industry tends to be the guide in thise case). This prevents suppliers from creating sheltered income, but it also creates more transparency in the chain by forcing the disclosure of true cost. The cost becomes fluid across all players in the chain, at least when it comes to fuel (the base price may still be designed to benefit the supplier, but I won’t go into that here). This is a great thing. While it raises cost accross the board, it does so in a fair and uniform manner (my CEO would be proud to see me write the above). It preserves margins where there is a margin, but sadly it reduces the operating margins. Instead of getting 16 cents to the dollar (16 %), we might get 16 cents for every $1.26 spent (12.7 %). This means that our working capital increases. In other words, our cost of doing business increases. No surprise there but it needs to be recognized.

The second part is that while the company is putting measures in place to create a fair fuel payout in the supply chain, it hasn’t done anything on a financial level. Everybody has been witnessing the ascension of oil since 2004-2005. Last year, it was even more dramatic. Yet, noone in our finance and accounting department judged it smart to hedge the business against fuel increases. My company I fear, doesn’t have a notion of risk management, and the result is that actual net income for 2007 were 10% of the expected number; the biggest culprit being fuel. A hedge allows you to control your cost of business, but we have taken the stance to just deal with whatever the weekly average is. Instead, if we had decided to lock a specific fuel rate based on our projected fuel consumption (1.4 (our projected growth for the year) x the number of miles billed in 2007 would have provided just that) we would improve our financial planning and have the ability to provide guaranteed benefits to our customers. Instead we are too cheap to take that position. “What if it goes down?”. Well a hedge is just that. It’s a protection, not a money making scheme. You pay a premium for securing your business costs. It seems that acting now would be a little late, but since no one knows how high oil may go, I’d go with protection rather than none.

1. Why was I so critical then

When I took my first MBA class, an operations management course at Kellogg, I hadn’t worked ever. I was a virgin mind, still waddling in the academia amniotic fluid. My neurons breathed formulas and the abstraction of a multidimensional polygon representing the solutions to my optimization problems; to top it off, the focus of my studies was operations research. The classes I took as part of my master’s covered everything and anything that could have possibly been covered in that class, minus the business cases – and to the author of that oversimplistic Pizza Pazza case: Pizza Mimi existed long before the INSEAD alumni responsible for this venture even attended the school. But I digress! The class I took, was a core class. It is not a class for a master’s student. It is a class to help MBA student get well rounded. Some people came from advertising, some from consulting or maybe even finance. However, that doesn’t matter: noone really uses those complex formulae in a company: they usually leave it to the quants, or like most management consultants, rely on estimates and common sense. I learned the hard way that in business, you can’t always push for the “optimal” solutions. What is easy in a class isn’t so straightforward in the real-world. I was being critical of kellogg students, but I was missing the point that there experiences were different, and that they sought knowledge in this class that was different from my expectations.

2. MBA, lots of money for relatively easy coursework?

As mentionned above, the operations management class had left me disappointed; fairly easy and straightforward; not to mention lenient on the grading. When you are used to taking the hardest classes in the engineering school for 5 years (try explaing to your friends in their theater class why an Operating Systems class might turn your life into a black hole), I think your threshold for what you consider easy becomes a little too high. Now that I’ve been working for 2 years, I might find myself pleasantly challenged by the material in an MBA. In addition, a topic other than Operations Research will certainly be more of a challenge and a novelty. I wonder what my opinion would have been then if I had taken a product pricing class in the marketing department.

3. The MBA is only partly about the classes

What I have learned to cherish is the value of networking; something you cannot truly appreciate when the college life provides all the comfort and security in the world needed (thank you mom and dad). What has networking done for me? More than I ever grasped:
- internships, a job, a consulting engagement, help from various people solving technical and conceptual problems in the business world, new friends etc. What has my networking done for others? Make it the same: jobs, internships, help, friendship. The world is one big network and it only gets better as you get connected to more dots. An MBA, is a new place to make friends, and certainly good ones. You will maybe find the one person that truly believes in your idea and wants to help you start a company. You will hear someone speak of the craziest opportunity ever and be so thrilled that you will join him. You will become friends with people who are bright in areas you are not, and get the chance to build great teams. Undergraduate classes foster competitiveness and (individual) excellence. An MBA fosters teamwork, or the art to contribute different pieces to a puzzle whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. No matter what you learn in class, if you know the same thing as the kid next to you, there is one too many in the room.

4. I want a break from IBanking

If you work for a couple years, an MBA is a certainly a time to have fun and relax. Take a large breath before taking that next step in your career. No wonder Kellogg has Friday Kegs and several other parties. It’s not when you work that you are going to have 400 of your friends ready every weekend to celebrate like its Oktober Fest in your school’s atrium.

5. I’m a sellout

Completely! Please do call me out on it.

The following link to Men’s Health highlights how restaurant fares quickly rack the calories

The following link to the NY Times (thanks to Dave for sharing) describe the state of cattle production in the US, and points back to the economics of it – and how government subsidies actually hurt the economy as a whole, a point made by Finkelstein in his book (read previous post)

As a reminder, I live in the US. As such it is the information I find myself the most exposed to. This doesn’t mean that similar problems don’t occur in other countries (though the amount of meat consumed in the US is head and shoulders above world levels).

While I think this is a great way to enable people to lead happier lives, learn to regain self-esteem and provide support at large in a society that likes to point the finger at those “apparent” oral hedonists (read: enjoy drinking and eating) for being solely responsible for their condition, I fear that this might be a serious double-edged sword. While a great passage quotes Catanese, an instructor of psychiatry and behavior sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, as saying “You can be overweight and healthy as long as you’re exercising, eating a nutritious diet” , the article is quick at pointing out that the wide acceptance of obesity could result in an even larger increase in obesity.

Without going into the whys and how of obesity, I’d like to bring up the following press release by Aramark. Aramark is a major foodservice player and has it’s thumb on the pulse of food consumption in the US, so when it announces in 2006 that “(it) found that American adults now report an average weight of 188.3 pounds, up 2.5 pounds over last year’s level – a national increase in weight of about 550 million pounds according to recent U.S. Census Data”, it is quite alarming. 550 million extra pounds is 2 trillion extra calories consumed. In other words, 2 billion Chipotle Burritos or 3,5 billion Big Macs per year. That’s some small change compared to the cost of a War in Iraq but that’s still some 12-13 extra billion dollars(using a $6.5/burrito estimate) spent that aren’t spent on other things in the economy and certainly increases several other costs: Fuel to transport heavier people on trains, airplanes and cars, but also the extra food consumed that needs to be produced and transported; Healthcare expenses for people taking Bacchus’ gift too much to heart; New clothing to fit that new waistline, and additional fabric needed to produce larger items. The list could probably go on but obviously, the implications of a population that’s heavier has a non-negligible impact on resources.

The key word I want to highlight is resources. And this is why I see obesity as something that should never be accepted as a social norm. Obesity is a threat to society at large: it consumes/wastes natural resources that would be saved if people didn’t carry those extra (several extras) pounds. If a third of American’s are overweight, using 300 million inhabitants and 10 lbs of extra mass per overweight person on average, that’s at least 1 billion pounds of human fat that requires energy to be moved and maintained. That is considerable. When you include healthcare costs, extra fabrics for larger people and the many inefficiencies that result from larger individuals (think of two airplane seats needed to a 300 lbs person…) it becomes hard to accept obesity as a good thing. Individuals are right by saying that they are free to do what they want with their body and eat until they explode, to the extent that it doesn’t affect anyone else. However, society at large is hurt by that behavior and for those reasons, obesity and weight should remain a focus for the well being of society at large.

So to go back to our double edge sword, it is important to offer support for overweight people. They are humans with the same rights. And for many, the factors resulting in those extra pounds can be very complicated and should inspire compassion. However, they potentially represent a heavy burden to society, and not just themselves. The needed support could come from within as is happening with the fat-o-sphere but in my opinion, only education can help Americans understand what good nutrition is, because people seem to entertain erroneous conventional wisdoms as demonstrated by the following remark from the Red Eye article: “Fantastic, this post has just cheered me up so much! I try to eat right and exercise regularly, but the dial on the scales just stays the same, and yet, every time I go for a check up, I’m told that I’m ticking away inside just fine!” This person assumes that the dial should go down because she eats healthy? She doesn’t acknowledge that eating healthy has enabled her to maintain her weight as opposed to gaining more weight.

Food companies love to brand products as low fat, low carbs or low calorie. People never learn to eat well and attempt to resort to calorie counting to “eat well”. Restaurant operators serve larger than needed servings (possibly to lower their per pound cost) and increase menu prices (sure it looks like a better value…but I would rather eat half of that at 75% of the price). Coke creates a can that includes multivitamin, and diet or cholesterol lowering pills have people thinking that miracle drugs will offset any of their excesses. Just make the sound choices; everyone out there is out to get your money regardless of wheter or not that low-fat brownie is actually good for you or not.

On a recent trip to Canada, I welcomed the size of the dishes served. It was also refreshing to see a population with a much smaller waistline, highlighting the challenges that appear specific to the United States, though France, Germany, Britain and even Japan are suffering from increasing obesity numbers. While I don’t see the situation changing much, a recent article in the FT Times about a book by Eric Finkelstein (The Fattening of America) offers some interesting insights into what needs to be truly addressed: the market fundamentals. The article says “blame government agricultural subsidies, which have lowered the cost of corn syrup used in the production of fizzy drinks, making fruit a comparatively less attractive crop”. Finkelstein’s conclusion, paraphrased by FT is to create “technological inventions…that succeed in countering the economically-determined spreading of our waistlines.”

On that last note, I’ll reflect on how lucky I am to enjoy my warm bowl of Oatmeal every day (and night…and whenever I feel like it).