Sunday, January 29, 2017

Missing chances

"Wasted opportunities will get back on you."

In life, as in games, one should understand a present situation and make some assumptions about future. Make a bet and try to pursue something in that direction hoping for the best while planting some "bad weather" safety guards along the way.

I haven't left Romania when I had the opportunity. I was in my comfort zone, earning well, keeping the family ties, most of my friends here. Now this is coming back on me. I feel that the country is not going in the right direction, that we think only in the present and we infest nothing in the future. And this hurts me because it will affect my daughter more than it will affect me.

On the other hand there are massive international opportunities for Romania as a country. Given the anti-globalization movement that just emerged in US there is a good chance for Romania to become a bigger player in some STEM domains.
Can we play smart this opportunity? There are some chances but overall we have to invest more. We have to invest more in Stability, schools and infrastructure.

Stability - there should be a long term plan, a bet on something that should be assumed by every political party. In this moment Romanians are playing "everybody on it's own". There is no coordination neither among individuals nor between parties, regions and such. We are kind of anarchic. The stability should be first applied in the law and taxes systems. It's kind of hard to make bets when the code of laws changes every second year and the taxation system is in perpetual oscillation. The education laws and curricula changes even more often. So we get confused students and teachers that live in a confusing system.

School - The myth of quality education in Romania was shattered for me a long time ago. Universities are close to nothingness, secondary education is in clinical death. The 4% to education budget was never in place despite all electoral promises hence teachers get underpaid so the good ones leave the system or concentrate to private lessons. The rest are petty graduates of 13th hand universities ("Spiru Haret" gang) that are not able to understand that they are teaching. They are able to reproduce the books by heart but totally unable to transmit the message or explain the content. Hence the students are again robots able to reproduce things but not creative or critical thinking.
Not being critical leads to obedience and acceptance of the status quo, one of the causes for the lack of stability.

Infrastructure - we have a fast internet that we use to download porn and dense railway on that the average speed is 30 km/h. We could use our fast networks to do something better (why there is no AWS region in Romania? Or Azure?). We could invest in our railway to make them economically viable reducing our dependence on cars and thus protecting the environment as the railways are already electrified.

I do not think that we will see any changes until the 100 years anniversary of  Greater Romania... Probably neither after. A catastrophe is needed to get us in our senses, or to finish us once for all as a nation.