Random tidings – SGH, stocks, blogs

Fellow students who, if Google Analytics tools don’t fail me, hardly ever visit PES may find here my outrage over what authorities of our school have done to us yesterday. Why did we file the course declarations in December, if one decision has nullified them? Why does somebody (put stock in the laconic announcement, and the guilty is prof. Joanna Plebaniak, who has showed lack of respect to students many times before) change the rules during the game? Why does nobody inform students about it? No wonder they get lost.

The worst thing about this is not the mess. I’ve learnt to live with the chaos built into my university, month by month it’s getting worse and whenever I think the sloth, incompetence and insolence have reached its climax, the next attempt to improve something proves me wrong. Every time the outcome of their activity is an outright failure, they try to tell us they had “temporary problems”, or they didn’t know, it wasn’t their fault etc. We, as students feel treated like downright idiots, because only a downright idiot would believe in their rubbish explainings.

The worst and hard to reconcile to is that people who screwed it up (don’t blame computing centre, they just fulfil orders from “dean’s office” and it’s not their fault that infrastructure is crappy) will never be held to account for this scandal. They will laugh in our faces and tell us “nothing has happened”. A man of honour would follow out a ‘PiS strategy’. PiS stands here for “Przeproście i Spieprzajcie!”. Unfortunately, they will never say sorry and, what is worse, they won’t bugger off! It is a human thing to make mistakes, but a decent man should be able to concede them, apologise and resign from a position they are not capable of holding it.

I feared the worst, I was prepared for the worst and nothing has taken me aback, so I sat in front of computer and after two and a half hours I straightened everything out. This time properly configured Firefox and usually crappy Play Online didn’t let me down. Thank God my adventure with Warsaw School of Economics will have been finished in a year, circumstances permitting. The last condition implies my hopes will be dashed.

Dear foreign readers, every time I visit any office of Polish administration I am truly grateful I’m not in my school. Any institution is more citizen-friendly than my school. I recently studied the economic collapse of Zimbabwe. If the whole Polish state administration worked like my school we would end up like the South-African country.

This has been a wonderful week on stock exchanges across the world. Indices plummeted by three to five per cent yesterday and today, wiping out the whole bull market from the last few months. On 4 February 2010 WIG 20 (Warsaw stock exchange blue chip index) slid by 4,11%, today it declined by only 3,95%. Since the last gasp of bull market it fell by 12%

Long live the free market, markets are sound, only the forecast found on “Profesjonalny Inwestor blog” is a bit scary – what I called a bull market might have been in Mr Bartłomiejczyk’s opinion just a correction in a long term downward trend. So are we going to see new troughs? Given the current fiscal problems and drags of public debts the pessimistic scenario is unfortunately conceivable. The first wave of crisis hit the financial sector, will the second one hit the governments which ran up debts to stimulate economies? Will the contagion of fiscal woes overcome stock markets? Poland’s situation seems very good, when compared to the countries which may face insolvency. Time will tell, at the present my forecast from 30 January proves right.

The most famous English-language blog about Poland is probably Polandian, but watch out now, I’ll give you a link to “Oto Polska”, the most infamous Polish-language blog about Poland. Don’t think it has anything in common in style or content with Polandian.

If you decide to click there, be prepared that the authors won’t pull any punches. Their picture of Poland is simple: a land of dog’s excrements lying on pavements and lawns, idiots brainwashed by Catholic Church, morons who try to outfox one another, cheat on every step, botch up everything they get round to. Their griping isn’t laced with any analysis, they don’t try to trace back the source of our national shortcomings, postings generally (not all) lack constructive criticism. Good blogging may include pouncing at bad solutions, but a writer should elaborate why a certain solution is flawed, how to improve it and justify it.

Authors of “Oto Polska” instead of delineating Poland’s inferiority and taking delight in calling Poles mongrels could rather use the Net to set up a movement to change this country. We are far from ideal place to live mostly for one reason – low level of social capital.

The most disturbing thing in the whole matter is that sadly many of their posts are totally true. Hadn’t they just been eaten up with hatred and crammed with foul language, they would have just described a dark side of Polish reality, like the post about Polish higher education system. Why does it strike a chord with me?

Penultimate optimistic part is a weather report. Last days were comfortably warm, yesterday daytime high was +2C, today temperature barely crept above zero. Snow was slowly melting. The coming days are expected to bring a bit frosty weather with light snowfalls. By and large, a normal February will follow a frosty January.

Final part is a photo from today’s hearing of Jarosław Kaczyński before parliamentary gambling scandal commission. Next time I go to a barber’s I’ll ask: Na Kaczyńskiego mnie proszę ostrzyć poproszę!