Why are strangers so attractive

I occasionally divert from my love of economics and today I am going to talk about something from a sociological or psychological angle.

To the best of knowledge, currently, I’m not attracted to anyone I know. Okay, now that I think about it I may be attracted to one or two. When I’m talking about people I know, I’m talking about the people on social media especially Facebook and LinkedIn. I think it’s fair to say that it’s pretty easy to strike up a conversation even with the ones on other sites like Twitter as long as they are following me.

But what is it about a stranger that makes me fall in love with them. Is it that the brain falls in love or should I say becomes infatuated with somebody or something that it knows it can never have. Often, I forgot about the stuff that I have and I am in a hurry to think about all the things that I don’t have. It has been said that love is pain. Love is misery, also. In the 1999 movie Notting Hill, Hugh Grant’s character William Thacker remarks that falling in love with someone and then getting them to love you back is so miniscule.

One thing that presses me when trying to date a girl I know is that I may lose her friend and this is a rather hard situation to be in.

When it comes to attracting strangers, there are some tips out on the web. Being yourself, smiling and making people laugh are some of the things that Medium states are necessary for attracting someone in 5 seconds or less. There are more or less tips in a similar vein from Inc. They do say that you don’t necessarily get hurt if you are truly in love. 

On which hand should men wear watches?

I saw a guy wearing his watch on his right hand and this got me thinking about this question. According to wrist watch specialists, there is no definitive answer. It just so happens that 89% of people are right handed and so they wear it on their less dominant hand which is the left one.
So the next time someone walks in and his watch on his left wrist, don't think that they are daft. It may be just that they are left-handed. 

How much taxi drivers make

I did a post on taxis in NYC and that inspired this post. So here is how much money taxi drivers make in different cities across the globe.

NYC

Uber - $90,000 per year

Yellow Cab - $32,000 per year

Source: CNBC

Colombo

Tuk tuk – 30,000 LKR per month (Source: Indi)

Uber – 100,000 LKR per month (Source: Medium)

Chennai

Ola/Uber – 30,470 INR per month

Source: Quora

How many taxis in NYC?

There are just over 13,500 taxis on the streets of NYC. The black cars now dominate the scene in New York with a size of 60,000. More than 46,000 of these black cars are connected with Uber. So the iconic yellow cab must be a pretty rare sight. All of these tuk tuks coming one after the other in Colombo, got me thinking about the number of yellow cabs in New York City. There are 1.2 million tuk tuks in Sri Lanka (this is the popular number listed everywhere), but I couldn’t get a figure for Colombo. It must be a pretty high figure. If you look at Chennai, there were just about 72,000 autorickshaws, according to a recent article on The Hindu. Chennai is 10 times the size of Colombo, but I still see autorickshaws zipping past whenever I go for a visit. 

Workers can't afford products they make

A Foxconn worker makes $1.78 per hour he or she is on the line. For a month, this works out to $290. The company deducts $72 for the small dorm room and meals offered by them. This leaves them with some money just north of $200. A large chunk is sent home to their villages. If they were to be selfish and spend on nothing else, it would take six months for them to buy an iPhone.

There is a piece by Business Insider on the amount of work done by the employees and the nature of it.

Bottomline: Foxconn workers don’t own iPhones, in general. 

How many cars are there in the world?

There are 1.02 billion cars in the world. This number is expected to double by 2040. Still, having a car is a luxury that most people in the world cannot afford. I have a driving license, but I am not the type of person who likes to drive. I can’t wait for the time when self-driving cars become a common sight on the roads. Then I’ll be able to afford one.

My father kept asking me whether I needed a car, but I preferred to ask him for that money to start a business. I’ve been looking at the various costs of having a car and whether it is worth saving for something that will depreciate so much and be worth next to nothing in ten years. There is the cost of acquisition and then maintenance, insurance and the gasoline. According to Consumer Expenditures in 2016, released in August of 2017 by the U.S. Department of Labor's U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average vehicle costs $8,003 per year to own and operate.

Personally, I feel that I could spend some money on a nice car, just one car for the whole household. So if I had a wife and two kids, we would all have one car for the four of us. 

The Life of the Five-Thousand Rupee Note

I was wondering how long the 5000 rupee note would last. So I researched the $100 bill as it is the note equivalent to the Sri Lankan five-thousand one. There is very little data on Sri Lanka and so I always have to look up the stuff in India or the US to get a rough idea. The Washington Post reports that the $100 bill is built to last with an estimated “life span” of 15 years.

The Fed has something to say on the topic too. It has estimated life spans of the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 notes. It states that the larger denominations are used as a store of value and so they pass between users at a much lower frequency.