On November 10, Obama announced a new plan in the APEC which is held in China this year. The plan extends Chinese student visas to five years and business and tourist visas to 10 years. Although it seems to be a benefit to Chinese population, it does mean more than that.

Approximately, there were 1.8 million Chinese population visiting America last year, bring America a considerable amount of income. A lot of job opportunities were also created in the process. What’s more, longer travel visas make it possible for Chinese parents to go overseas with their children. Therefore, age range of population who study overseas is widened because small kids can also live well in a foreign country with accompanies of their parents. Besides, more Chinese old generation will go aboard to spend their late life due to the good living conditions and longer visas. As the result, the people who really immigrate to America will decrease and the housing market will be increasingly popular in America as well as a huge amount of job opportunities are created.

So, by extending Chinese visas, America is able to build more connection with China, gaining more benefit to the nation but without obtaining more population. America has successfully facilitates their economy.

Resource:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392456/obama-starts-taking-executive-action-immigration-joel-gehrke

United Nations was established on 24 October 1945 and devotes its efforts to maintaining international peace and security. Assuming that United Nations is fully funded, they will be able to donate a sufficient amount of money to third world countries and enhance their living conditions in short term. However, no matter how much funds United Nations has, it is never enough to help the whole world. They must run out of funds in the future and the countries they are supporting will suffer poverty again. That why organizations like ARC or social enterprises are significant.

Instead of simply donating basic necessities or money, social enterprises provide the people in developing countries with skills, techniques and finance they need to start up a business and improve the business that they have. Therefore, people suffering poverty will not be the side that only accepts others kindness, they can be productive, showing their values as well.

United Nations solves the short term emergency of poor countries, while social enterprises support underdeveloped countries with long term benefit. Both forces are essential to the globe. With the help of United Nations and social enterprises, actions to help the third world would be more effective.

Resources:

http://skollworldforum.org/about/what-is-social-entrepreneurship/

http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/Global_Reach/ARC_Initiative

http://news.ubc.ca/2014/06/30/upward-arc/

Organizational culture is a sustainable advantage that helps a company to be more efficient. Mostly, every successful company has a unique organizational culture, so as Google. It has a very impressive organizational culture where freedom is underlined. In the office area, workers are free to chat and play games at wills and they also can name their own office. It is even hard to tell where the different between office and recreation area. Moreover, Google provides perfect welfare services to its employees, including free meals, medical care, laundry and even traveling. Most importantly, every employee can use 20% of their work time to do the subjects that they like. By creating such organizational culture, ideas are easy to pop up, thoughts of all employees are taken equally. I think it is really hard to tell whether the cost of doing that is worthwhile or not. For example, for the 20% of work time Google compromises, although workers would use that period of time on things other than the work they are assigned, there is a small probability that something revolutionary would show up like Gmail and Google News. So, we cannot simply measure the return according to numbers, instead, the return is the important creativity that comes with the freedom.

Resource:

http://www.google.com/about/company

Having read though a blog wrote by Damsel, I feel something different. He mentioned that there are a lot of students whose educational expense are paid by parents meanwhile complain about they do not have enough money to buy what they want. Also, it is our parents fault to pay our fees we have to go to part time job to understand the price of the education and we should participate in part time job to earn money, reducing the burden of our parents.

I do agree about some part of his argument that it is necessary that we repay our parents but definitely not now. During our time in the University, so many valuable opportunities have emerged. If we waste our time on part time jobs that give us limited return and experiences and can be done by anyone who has not attended a university, the benefit of going to universities will be reduced. Also, to understand the price of our education, we do not have to really take the job and see how it feels to earn our tuitions. Because people earn money at different rates, higher rates are the consequences of high education and experience which will be obtained through school life and activities.

So, the best we can do to show our appreciation to our parents is to finish what we are expected to do in universities.

Resource:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/cdamsel/2014/11/10/pay-for-it-yourself/

An effective marketing strategy is significant to a company to publicize their point of difference. No matter the scale of the company is large or small they can always win more market shares due to the successful marketing. However, simply market the products for the purpose of increase the profit may not have a huge impact to the market. Once the purpose of marketing is linked with intentions that could benefit the society, a lot more responses can be seen. Having read though a blog written by Raza, I was shown a good example.

In his blog, he talks about ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Before the challenge appears, there are only a small number of people who know the disease. But after the Challenge has been launched, not only the awareness of ALS is improved but also $100 million dollars fund are donated. The purpose of this Challenge is let more people be aware of ALS which is a terrible disease that mostly result in death, which has positive meaning to the society. The consequence is successful.

From the example, we can clearly see that relating the marketing strategy to social benefit will make it more effective. Along this path, companies can increase the profit and contribute to the society at the same time.

Resource:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/razarazi/2014/11/01/marketing-how-effective-can-an-idea-be/

Since Canada was created in 1867, the relationship between federal government and First Nations has always been an issue, the Indian Act was signed to control the situation. Once aboriginal people were strongly encouraged by The Indian Act to be assimilated, they can forego their aboriginal identities by different approaches like getting an university degree and marrying a non-status man. Even some aboriginal traditional activities were banned. Moreover it is fact that aboriginal populations are more or less facing discrimination. During a long period of time, First Nations children were forced to go to residential school where they were made to forget their aboriginal everything and they were often abused. Knowing the leak of the Act, Prime Minister presented the apology of Canada, the conflicts are still impossible to be properly solved. However, although the First nations do not like the feeling of being controlled, they are not willing to give up the privilege and protection by undoing the Act.

I think, given the problem are not to be solved easily, letting the First nations make their own choices under the protection of Canada is probably the right way of dealing with it. Because setting too much constraint for First Nations may cause the furies of them making chaos among whole nations. Also it is hard to just take away the benefit of being one of the First Nations making them equally fair as every Canadian. Thus The Indian Act should not be there. More flexible arrangement should come on stage.

Alibaba, an internet company that focuses on B2B, complete its IPO in New York America. Meanwhile, the founder of this internet company, Ma Yun, has become the richest man within China. Shortly after that he gave a speech on his opinions to success. There is one part that the public found controversial. The translated version is basically “you are poor because you do not have the courage to begin, you are poor because you do not have the ambition to success, you are poor because you have wasted your youth. If you are still poor at the age of 35, you deserve it.” However, Regardless of how encouraging or biting the speech is, I found this is actually a veiled strategic movement. People who disagree with him might be furious but will still use Taobao, which is the online market that Alibaba gain profit from. Because it is absolutely dominating the Chinese market, there are no any substitutes that can provide such diverse services like Taobao does. However, people who find it encouraging will be inspired trying to start a business when they are young. But starting a business in the cruel competition in China is hard and establishing a small scale shop on Taobao has been one of the easiest ways for the past ten years. That really helps Alibaba survive longer, because the online transactions is the core of their revenue stream.

Recently, the new products of Apple, Iphone6 and Iphone6Plus have gone public. One of the most distinguish features of these extremely popular Phones is that they have very large screen. The screen size of Iphone 6Plus is 5.5” which is very close to the screen size of an Ipad mini. So why does Apple make such big Phones that seems to contradict with its other product making Ipad in an awkward situation. In my own opinion, it is because Ipad has a lot of close substitutes and it does not have a clear value proposition. Nowadays, it is the fact that Ipad sales are gradually decreasing, many companies have found that the electronic pad is profitable and started to produce. For example, there are Sony Pads, Lenovo Tabs and even more pads that use Android system. So it is very hard to win this turbulent competition. Also Ipad is designed for gaming and reading and doing office works. So compared to a IPhone that has similar big and high resolution screen, Iphone is more easy to carry. And compared to desktop, Ipad is less convenient and powerful. Do we really need an Ipad if we can read and play games on a Iphone 6Plus?

http://mashable.com/2014/10/03/is-the-iphone-6-plus-too-big/

Nike is one of the largest companies that manufactures mainly sports footwear and sells its products all around the world and with a annual revenue of over 20 billion dollars. There is no doubt that the company is successful, but it does face the ethical controversy. Back in about 2008, Nike was reported to establish sweatshop in such Asian countries like Vietnam, India, Indonesia and China. Workers working in sweatshop are paid with extremely low wages that is far less than the standard hourly wage rate and cannot get the overtime wages for working extra hours. Moreover, this kind of sweatshops provide workers the poor working environment where the safety and rights cannot be protected.

I think business ethics are especially essential to companies that are weak and in the perfect competition, because once a described company decides to persue short term profit by not performing the business ethics, the consequences are serious. The company may be less competitive, which means it will lose almost everything due to the lack of loyalty and the fact that there are millions of substitutes in the market. However, when the company gets bigger and earns a lot of loyalty of its costumers, the ethics become unimportant in terms of revenue. For instance, although the Nike’s sweatshops was reported in 2008, its annual revenue still keep increasing from 12 billions 2008 to 22 billions 2013. Same situation could also happens to Oligopoly and Monopoly. Therefore, for those companies that have a considerable number of loyal consumers, the business ethics are weakly related to revenue, whether the companies are ethical depend on whether the leaders of the companies believe in the sentence high standings should shoulder more responsibility.

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