Category: Rants

Random Discourse – The Singapore Dream

4 comments

Excerpt from blog post: Some “difficult” personal ideas[19-Dec-2009]

The Singapore Dream is dead… You get married, then have children to get some discount to buy ownership in a HDB for 99 years is a lie to keep you a slave for the system. After a while you get sick and die surrounded by consumer goods that you don’t really need. Consumption now generates most of government taxes.

Consumption not only generate most of the government’s gahmen’s taxes. Consumption is the very dynamo of the economy of the Free World. In fact, this might even be the way of life that China aspires to have for her citizens. George ‘Warmonger’ Bush said this after the 9-11 attacks:

I encourage you all to go shopping more.

Call it an encouragement from the American President to the people to show they are not cowering in fear by living their lives as it is. The truth is, there is more at stake here than not showing an outward sign of weakness and defeat to the terrorists. A failure to throng the malls and spend money would have serious consequences for the American economy (and the world economy in general). People need to spend to keep economic activities going, which in turn keeps people employed and provide the money for them to continue spending.

The same goes for Singapore. That is why malls after malls are erected to satisfy our material cravings. Vivocity, Jurong Point extension, Illuma, Orchard Central, ION Orchard, 313 Orchard are such fine examples of monuments to consumerism.

Meantime, the media floods our senses through advertisements with all that dazzling consumer goods. Trade fair after trade fair, especially those for so-called state-of-the-art and ultra high-tech gadgets that would become obsolete in 6 ~ 12 months draw in the crowds and rake in an astonishing amount of revenue which make a mockery of the recession. Very often I see on micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Plurk or the status in Facebook, someone announcing the acquisition of a new purchase for a DSLR, iPods, game console or mobile phones. At times, the same person would announce the acquisition of several items within a week and sometimes within the day itself! The items are not just a cheap sub-$50 thumb drive but an expensive mobile phone or a DSLR camera. Whether they completely utilise the features available don’t matter at all since they can pay for it.

This is the Singapore Dream. Always chasing after the next best electronic gadget or the next better car or better located condominium. An endless cycle of spending… and debt. The dream is never dead, it is just one the gahmen wants to keep everyone from waking up from. It wants us all to keep dreaming for a better outcome.

That way, one remains a slave of the system. Indeed, Singapore is like a warm bath where one sinks in, slits his wrists and watch his lifeblood drains away and he wouldn’t even bother he is dying because it’s warm. Slowly, as life drains away one drift into a sleep he would never wake up from and dream wonderful things while he dies. It would be almost painless, and one probably can find no better manner to waste his life away. Thus, Singapore taps us all of our labor just like how the Matrix would tap humans of their energy as a battery until they die. Just don’t scream and cause everyone else to wake up in panic when one realise his dream is nothing more than a nightmare.

Shhhh… Be quiet!! I am trying to sleep and dream my sweet Singapore dream.

Welcome to Singapore.

Recommended Read:
National Geographic: The Singapore Solution

Recommended Video:
Smart Planet: Is the IPhone bad for innovation?

Commentary – Not filling but yet not starving

8 comments

This is an excerpt from my friend Christopher’s blog [Post: So this is what people call a “dangerous idea” dated 9-12-2009]:

This means that if one can sustain himself indefinitely, he may be able to demand better treatment from his employers or even buy time to take a political stand. $2,000 a month is a small figure but consider how difficult it would be to get the government to give you $2,000 in this country.

I once told a friend that it is ‘optimal’ for a government gahmen to keep a nation’s people in a borderline state called: 吃不饱，饿不死 [Translation: Not filling but yet not starving].

Consider the two extremes. If the people are starving and dying then they will rise in revolt because they are likely to have nothing to lose but their lives anyway. If they are well fed, then they will start having all sorts of funny ideas on how to make things better and start meddling in how things are run. The in-between condition means that people will be kept in a situation in which they fear losing more if they rise up in revolt, but are saddled with enough burdens to keep them from being too meddlesome.

In Singapore, this condition is achieved through so-called “affordable public housing”. It is interesting to note that in Chinese it is written as: 负担的起的公共房屋. The reason being the words 负担 (in noun form) simply means burden. It would not be ironical, if one were to say that housing is now synonymous with burden – even for public housing built by the HDB. In China, there is a term for this: 蜗居 – which literally translates as the dwelling of a snail. Quite aptly put, since like snails we are all carrying our housing loans like a snail carries its shell.

Thus, it is almost comical when the Minister Mentor Monkey Mentos reassured Singaporeans that HDB will continue to build “affordable”flats when he also said, “‘Well, they have got to decide if the country is going to go up or go down. If the country is going to go down, then the economy will go down and their incomes will be down – unemployment will go up and property values will come down.”

It is interesting to note how the gahmen uses the economy to argue things their way all the time. On one hand they argue that we should bite the bullet and take pay cuts, not to expect huge bonus and good pay increments because of the current status of the economy. On the other they now justify the ridiculously high prices of our so-called public housing as a reflection of the economy. It is almost as if the Singapore economy has a split personality. That’s not forgetting, while the MM tells us to decide ‘if the country is going to go up or go down’, the gahmen said it was due to external factors and it got nothing to do with them when the economy headed south not very long ago. To me they might as well just say, “Tough. But there’s nothing much we do about it!’

In other words, what we decide about our economy has no effect on our economy at all. Even if what we decide has any effect, can we actually expect our pay to go up in tandem in terms of percentage just like our property prices if we decide the economy is to go up?

If I am not wrong, a minister (can’t remember who) once said that the gahmen considered our housing as ‘affordable’ as long as the monthly installments is not more than 20% of our income. Right, that means for every dollar you earn, you give 20cents away to the gahmen to pay for a house which you technically just lease from the gahmen… for the next decade if you are lucky (and for a couple of decades or so if you are not). Frankly, I wonder just how many Singaporeans are saddled with a housing loan that would require them at least 15 – 25 years to pay it off. Would the HDB be so kind to provide us the figure? Is that what is meant by affordable – i.e. being burdened with a debt that would take one almost one generation to pay off?

Is it a wonder why in the end, the Singaporean worker is the most meek and they continually suffer in silence as some of the worst paid workers in the developed world (without even considering what a lapdog our so called gahmen-controlled union)? Is it a wonder why many low level Singaporean workers just swallow their pride and keep quiet in the face of some of the most incompetent middle level managers in the world even when they could have been right?

So, I felt what Christopher has written makes a lot of sense because if we Singaporeans aren’t in the current predicament we are in, we would gladly tell some of these pathetic managers off, and even ask for better remuneration at work. If we Singaporeans aren’t saddled with all these burdens and worries, we would have no reservations making our decisions at the ballot box because the sum of our fears (for many Singaporeans) is simply the fear of losing our financial stability. The Tali-PAP has certainly done well in equating political stability with economic stability and thus indirectly our personal financial stability.

Even though I do not believe that Tali-PAP deliberately ‘created’ this system of modern serfdom or slavery through housing, I am convinced that they realised that it would be the most prefect method to keep majority of Singaporeans in a 吃不饱，饿不死 condition which will keep them in power for a long time to come.

The day when Singaporeans wake up from the fact that the ‘Singapore Dream’ of owning a property of his own is nothing but a nightmare, will perhaps be the day Singapore turn out en mass to vote the Tali-PAP out of power. Perhaps, that day is now though I suspect there’s not much a new gahmen will do to change this if they come to power.

I forgot to mention… the best and most tangible baby bonus, is to build real affordable housing.

Recommended Reads:
FoxTwo’s Microblog: Bureaucratic Stupidity
Growing your tree of prosperity: So this is what people call a “dangerous idea”

Commentary – Michael Arrington

2 comments

This following statement is made by Michael Arrington, after he felt he got the short end in his cooperation with a Singaporean company called Fusion Garage on the CruchPad (now called Joo Joo).

The founder of Fusion Garage, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, isn’t a good guy. He has been caught plagiarizing articles. His previous company Radixs disintegrated in shareholder disputes and angry employees. We didn’t learn about this until last Summer because Singapore media, including blogs, are largely controlled by the government. Embarrassing stuff just isn’t reported. – Michael Arrington

Sweeping statements is a clear sign of a person’s desperation and that he is short on arguments. Here’s some facts for Michael Arrington: Do something offensive against bloggers and / or their friends in Singapore, and see just how quickly the bloggers react and how the offender gets a cyber-drubbing he’ll never forget. The offender will also be the butt of all jokes for a long time and it won’t be long before the incident becomes the thing most talked about in Singapore’s blogosphere and major forums, and in no time even the local evening tabloids would have picked up the news and reported it. In short, bloggers in Singapore are generally spontaneous when they are slighted, or when they read about something unjust, outrageous and offensive – such as a group of foreigners bullying an old trishaw rider. One can find no more passionate argument and solidarity in Singapore than Singapore’s blogosphere, even though at times there are several opinion camps on the same matter. In fact, at times I am concerned with the viciousness of some fellow bloggers when they expressed their opinion.

If Michael Arrington is trying to provoke some response or support from the local blogosphere for his plight, sweeping statements isn’t going to get him any. In fact, while I may even have agreed with Arrington if he thinks Singapore’s blogosphere is full of shallow and mundane postings such as mine, but accusing that all of us are controlled by the government gahmen is one bullshit that really takes the cake. Just what the fxxk were you thinking, Arrington?

For the record, I have never heard of Fusion Garage, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan or even Radixs until recently. What Fusion Garage or Radixs do, and just who the fxxk is Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan wouldn’t have mattered to me unless they are going to put together something that is revolutionary. Try pull someone off the streets and ask him about Radixs or Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan and most of them would have given you the ‘what the fxxk’ look. Simply put, Singapore’s bloggers such as I won’t and can’t report on how allegedly shitty Fusion Garage, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan or even Radixs is when they have never even heard about them!

Even if I have heard about those people, it probably was reported by a geek or tech blogger – being rare and few in Singapore – and it wouldn’t have attracted more interest beyond the article the names were written on. After all, these companies and people aren’t as famous as Dell or Warren Buffet. Frankly, I don’t even know who are the chief scientists and engineers behind the Large Hadron Collider, even though I have heard and read about that more often than TechCrunch. Personally, the reason I have heard about TechCrunch is simply because of the Techcrunch vs Nuffnang saga 2 years ago. In short, I wouldn’t give a sh*t about TechCrunch otherwise even as a blogger, much less about a Michael Arrington in his little petty squabble with a company situated here in Singapore. For the record, the only person with a name close to that is a Michael Carrington Tan, a classmate of mine back while I was in Polytechnic.

As to Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan and Fusion Garage’s dispute with Arrington, Arrington has taken everything online, presented all the evidence from his side while Fusion Garage hasn’t presented their side of the argument at all. While I personally have some bigoted opinion and reservations about people from the Indian sub-continent, I detest what I called ‘trial by the Internet’ where someone presented a one sided argument and pronounced the other party guilty when they simply haven’t even given their side of the story yet. In my opinion, no one could really make a comment or take sides in the matter when everything is so one sided and unclear regardless of our personal sentiments or sympathies. Either way, even if the courts of law ultimately ruled in favor of Arrington, I would still have kept my bigoted opinion of Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan (whom I do not even know) to myself.

I’ll give Michael Arrington some credit for being a tech writer. But on socio-political matters, he’s definitely out of his league. He should get out more often from his geeky existence, and perhaps even look at all the Singaporean sites like The Temasek Revew, The Online Citizen and even some of the so-called ‘social activists’ sites which I considered cesspools to see just how one sided Internet opinion is against the ruling party and the gahmen before he labelled the whole blogosphere as being gahmen-controlled. After all, reading some of these articles makes us think a revolution is about to break out tomorrow and the Tali-PAP will be thrown out of power right way.

All these being said, I personally wouldn’t mind being a blogger ‘controlled’ by the gahmen. In fact, if it would throw in a unit at the Duxton Pinnacle, write off my housing loan, and put whatever I have paid from my CPF back into my CPF account complete with accrued interest, and pay me another 120% of my salary monthly while I keep my current job, I would gladly write glaring reports on the gahmen’s policies and directives unabashedly. Who gives a damn on what names people are calling me while I enjoyed ‘the Singapore Dream’ in the land of my birth?

Alas, I can only dream about that while I remained a serf laden with debts in Singapore, endlessly complaining and whining about ‘a system of modern slavery’ perpetuated Singapore’s ‘caring and responsible’ gahmen. Then again, maybe Singapore’s bloggers can sue Arrington in a Class Action Suit for libel in the U.S., since Arrington probably couldn’t produce any evidence to show any blogs of persons not affiliated with the ruling party as being controlled by our gahmen.

Rant 05.12.2009

Leave a comment

This photo was taken by the CIO and sent to my direct boss, when he was attending a meeting. He was unhappy that this rack-mounted switch which was set up for a meeting was simply left on the desk. To him it was an unsightly mess.

Why was this switch set up in the room and left on the table in the first place was because there weren’t sufficient ports in the room to support the number of laptops required. From the looks of the photo, I suspect that even if we had set up the switch on the floor, there is no avoiding the tangle of wires. Whether the complaint came from the CIO personally or he was upset because someone commented on our ‘shoddy work’ is irrelevant. What would be relevant would be a long term solution to the insufficient IT infrastructure in that particular meeting room. However, I do not pretend to know management and tell my CIO what actually requires to be done.

Our CIO does give us the feeling that he looks down on us, the very ‘grunts’ who would face the enemy (i.e. the users) on the front line. I have seen on one occasion he gave one of my seniors a dressing down over the matter of housekeeping in our department room. I do not know whether he had actually came all the way down from our data centre down at the armpit of Singapore (somewhere near Paya Lebar Airbase) to do that, or my senior was just unfortunate to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I could only say I am fortunate not to be the one on the receiving end of his tongue lashing, but for sure I do find it ridiculous that ‘the CO [Commanding Officer] is doing the work of the CSM [Company Sergeant Major’. During our days in National Service, a good CO almost never give direct orders to us pertaining to matters of camp maintenance or area cleaning. That falls under the supervision of the CSM, who will order us to do all sorts of menial labor such as plucking weeds from the glass patch in front of the company line office, clearing mud from the drain ‘intersector’ (a term invented by a CSM), washing the vehicle bay and wiping dust from fan blades and florescent light covers in our bunks. In short, the CO only concerns himself with matters of the macro-management of the unit and such matters of micro-management is normally left to the CSM or the individual Platoon Sergeants. There’s always a good reason for a chain of command.

Anyway, other than the above, at times the CIO would override decisions our direct boss made, or even IT security protocols to satisfy ‘people in power’ who contact him directly over a certain matter. In one particular incident, after we and our boss have rejected a particular request to set up a laptop that is not built to the company’s standard, the CIO spoke to the same senior above and asked him to get it done. He claimed it to be a one off incident. (The reason for such a request is because the user’s secretary would not want to mix work with home and has an irrational fear that her personal stuff such as photos or videos may end up on the company’s network. How that would be possible when access to the company via VPN is through Citrix is beyond me! We suspected that the real reason for this request was that the security protocols on company compliant laptops would have prevented it from connecting to any network outside the company to access the Internet, since it is locked down to allow only IP addresses on the local subnet it is connected to, and then to the website that connects the VPN.)

Unfortunately, we end up manually installing another laptop for another user within a month. Even so, on the second occasion it was at least justified since the user was doing the company’s work – being a sales trader who would be introducing our company’s trading platform to potential customers. In the context of the army, what the CIO has done is the equivalent of the CO disregarding the TSR [Training Safety Regulations] and directly meddling in the execution of low level combat tactics. As we all know how often that leads to disastrous consequences.

Thus, in a certain way, when the CIO actually sent the photo to our direct boss and not to us directly, it is actually an improvement, though not by much. Perhaps he has been reading some ‘For Dummies’ book recently. Frankly, I personally do hope that there are other matters that would direct his attention to concentrate more on the macro-management aspect of the department.

Leave it to the ‘grunts’ like us and the field commanders to do the real fighting. I’ll definitely prefer he sits in the comfort of his command center and not bother about us. Alternatively, I hope the auditors have had enough of his disregard for IT security protocols and smack him on the arse for his endless meddling in daily operations.

I almost forgot… one of the field commanders is the ‘bway kan’ guy that I mentioned in an earlier rant. How tragic!

Rant 03.12.2009

Leave a comment

Sometimes, some people should realize that simply because he is in a managerial position, doesn’t mean he can try and push everything to a subordinate – especially when the task doesn’t even belong. After all, there’s a good reason why there’s a segregation of roles and if someone goes on leave and there isn’t a backup, as a ‘manager’ it is his own responsibility to seek assistance to resolve the matter and not try to word it in such as way that it becomes the problem that is completely unrelated to another sub-section.

What makes it worse is that even after being explained to that the task has completely nothing to with my sub-section, he insists that I relay the message to the person responsible when this matter has nothing to do with us in the first place. Did I mention that the person responsible is ON COURSE for crying out loud?

I can understand that there are ‘people managers’ and there are ‘technical managers. However, the key in being a ‘people manager’ is knowing who is the best person to use for the task, and not simply ‘arrowing’ another person and expects him to so-call ‘take ownership’. If one doesn’t have the relevant technical skills, nor does he have a clue how to do the task, at least have the initiative and responsibility to find out how to do so himself, or refer to the right person to do it. If not, it is high time he admit he is an incompetent fxxk and quit his job

But clearly I can’t expect that from a certain person, since he can obviously sleep well at night even though he clearly does not deserve their pay. That’s not forgetting how he once tried to shirk from the responsibility of a mistake that he made – when records on the Door Access Card Scan showed without a doubt that he was the one who forgot to close the server room door. Nice try for attempting to have one of us own up and be your scapegoat. Did it occur to him that if it was a court of law, perjury is a crime?

But what can I expect from this unethical f**k? He asked 3 vendors for a quote, but he then helped another vendor who is his friend to outbid the rest of them. That’s also not mentioning that because of his own “Blackberry Bold Envy” he made a big fuss about the legality of ‘jailbreaking’ some Blackberry 8707h from Docomo which are no longer under contract, not to mention already written off by our Tokyo office. All that simply because he wanted a new Blackberry handset. In fact, when he has been such an unethical and despicable mofo, how dare he even breathe a word about legality?

Finally, I wanna say this to him, and it should have been said a long time ago, YOU ARE INCOMPETENT. WORST OF ALL, YOU ARE A DODGY ASSHOLE WHO DIDN’T HAVE THE BALLS TO BEAR THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NOT ONLY YOUR MISTAKES, BUT ALSO THAT OF YOUR ROLE.

I wished he was a part of those people who resigned or took the retrenchment package because I actually liked working with those people who left. KNN!!!

1 … 30 31 32 33 34 … 99