General election, 2015!

It puzzles me when the media speculate about how Tories and Lib Dem are going to campaign for the 2015 election with their current coalition position, some suggesting that there will be joint campaign where Tories and LD candidates will concede seats for each other. It seems to me that the British media's over-active reporting is the result of under-active imagination.

Naturally, there are too many variables as to what will happen in over 4 years time. The coalition might not last until then. The public poll might swing many times before the actual election. There may even be change of leadership as history suggests. Some MPs might be have been prosecuted with their expense claim scandal. It seems absurd for journalists and broadcasters to be asking politicians now how the coalition will work out for the election results when wars, terrorist attacks, climate change could have bigger impact on our lives between now and then.

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The power of praises

Harvard business research shows the power of praises and how they convert into favours. Surely this is basic psychology?

It is nice anyway to notice the positives about others and point these out often, given that it is delivered with genuineness. We can't be kind enough to each other in this age of accountability and litigation. But if you were to come across a genuinely not-so-nice person whom you wish to pick up something nice about but just find it beyond possibility, without going into psychoanalysing them (given you are capable of it), would you choose to make up the praises or omit any comments altogether?

Being critical

I have only recently been able to differentiate between being self-critical and being hard on self. So many times I failed to recognise my own errors when the same would not escape my radar if made by others. It is so easy to be hard on yourself and yet less forgiving of others. Until I stopped to digest events, would I realise that when you criticize others' actions, the same could be said about you and your flaws.

It is not hard to be nice to other people and to forgive. The more people trying this, the better off the society would be. And yet we tend to let our baser reaction take control of our interaction with others - the media thrashing the government, the public bodies like our healthcare, police, schools being harshly judged all the time when their work is the hardest. If you think about it, profit making organisations have it easy in my view. The worse that could happen is you make a loss. Although shareholders could claim that they could voice their views about how the execs handle their business to protect their interest, we hear all the time about these fired execs getting offered a new job in the rival firm in no time at all.

Information Overload?

Information consumption is becoming a chore to me. We are expected to blog, tweet, post facebook statuses, etc. Then we consume others' blogs, tweets, posts, etc. And this ranges from our friends, associates, acquaintances, famous people, friends of friends', associates of associates', down to any random guys. And all this is in addition to our other searches for information through the web. There should be a research that confirms that it is not physically humanly possible for us to keep sane with all this information, without having a life outside of iPhone, iPac, BB, and PCs.