Short Takes

Sometime ago, I was having a chat with Nicole about filing tax returns. Even though my tax returns are automatically filed, I decided to log into ‘myTaxPortal’ on the IRAS site to confirm that. As I did so, I noticed the tax calculator – an online tool which allows me to calculate the amount of income tax I need to pay for 2010.

Out of curiosity, I transferred the figures from my IR8A onto the tax calculator. I was a little surprised to see that the total amount of taxes I need to pay for the year comes was a mere 2.5% of what I earn in 2009. I also found out that the 20% mandated CPF savings actually serves as a tax relief as well, though some might consider CPF to be as good as money ‘given’ to the government gahmen. I realized that all these years I have never bothered with the details of my tax returns, and I had merely just fill in the figures blindly.

Still, 2.5% of this year’s income is a surprising low tax rate, and that probably explains why there is this relative lack of of welfare in Singapore. It was rather sobering to realize that I lived in one of the countries with the lowest tax rates. Christopher aka Modeus pointed out that this is a fact that few Singaporeans appreciate while many complain endlessly about COE, Road Tax, ERP and GST. In my opinion the first three is more or less self inflicted with a car purchase, though I wouldn’t deny that adds on to the costs of businesses which require transports. That’s not mentioning I am a big fan of the ERP.

As for GST, the fact remains that even if you spend every single cent of your disposable income (i.e. 80% of your income), the total amount taxed will only be 5.6% of that year’s income. Even when I add the 2.5% I paid as Income Tax, that’s just about 8.1% of my total income for the year. That’s not mentioning that since I won’t be spending every cent I earn, the real effective tax rate would be far lower than that! And that’s something I can be happy about.

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I read this on the New York Times recently: Members of Congress from both parties sought to put more pressure on China to allow an increase in the value of its currency, saying Beijing’s policy of holding the value down to give China an edge in export markets was holding back job creation in the United States.

In short, the Americans are accusing the Chinese of currency manipulation. I’ll admit I know nuts about finance and economics, so I am totally confused as to how that came about. After all my understanding about economics and finance is as good as Mahathir who thinks currency trading involved traders trading physical bags of different currency.

I suppose that when the Chinese pegs the Renminbi (or Chinese Yuan – CNY) to the US dollar (USD), that means that as the Obama Administration prints more money (which it did, since it’s broke and has no money to bail the banks out), Chinese currency would have necessary appreciate against the USD. For China to maintain the current exchange rate, China will simply print more money as well because I don’t know any better way than this. In short, China has definitely printed more money since it had pumped a lot of money into its own economy last year to mitigate the impact of the crisis that originates from… well… the US. Where is all the money going to come from when China is spending money on infrastructure, while also buying US Treasury bonds?

Based on my understanding (or misunderstanding) of the state of affairs here, I think the real currency manipulator is the US. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that the US would like to maintain a strong USD policy. That simply means the US expects everyone to start printing more money – except well, China. If China is going to do that it’s the equivalent of slamming the brakes on its economy and we all know what disastrous consequences would result from that! Now, I call that evil.

Next, China is the second largest buyer of US Treasury bonds – i.e. China is the second largest creditor (after Japan) of the US gahmen’s debts. I take it that the reason developing (aka poorer) China is lending money to developed (richer) US is to preserve value of its own currency.

Since these loans are denominated in USD, that means when the US gahmen pays the Chinese gahmen it would be in USD. If China has appreciated its currency, it would suddenly discovered that it might have gotten the short end of the deal because after making the exchange back to CNY, the Chinese maybe left with less money than it paid for the bond. Just who lends people money, and get back less than its principal sum even after interest? Maybe to friends and when you lend friends money you generally can forget about getting it back anyway. Not to mention that it would be hard for China to consider the US a friend in the first place!

In short, the freaking Americans are telling China: ‘I am expecting you to forgo the interest you are going to make from the loans you gave to me so I can create jobs for my people. Yep, I am saying that you should be paying to create jobs in the US for Americans. If you aren’t gonna do that, I am gonna punish you.’

The Americans probably forgot that as Russell Peters once said the Chinese is the one race that is best at making money out of someone else. I am glad China stayed put and told the Americans to fxxk off.

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I recently made the comment that ‘Apple is a piece of shit company that’s only good at packaging its low tech stuff as being more superior… and has always resort to legal action to harm competitors who simply think they could do the same with their own products.’

I am basically saying Apple makes no technical innovation but the way I worded it made it sound like Apple does not innovation at all. When read that way, obviously such a comment pushes the limits of patience in everyone and it isn’t going to earn me any friends other than those who already hate Apple as much as I already do. In no time someone disagreed that Apple is not doing any innovation. He pointed out that Apple was ‘the first’ to put GUI (Graphical User Interface for the uninitiated) and the mouse in its own computers, and also ‘the first’ to bring in the power of linux/unix into the the hands of everyone.

It is a fair view from someone I have always know to be fair in his opinions. On retrospect, he was right to point out that Apple innovated personal computing or the way we use personal computers. Unfortunately we are disagreeing on different perspectives. As far as I am concerned, I was simply pointing out that Apple made no technological innovation and I quickly went into defensive since none of these – GUI, the mouse and even Linux / Unix – were invented by Apple.

It is a fact that Xerox beat Apple to in both the mouse and GUI as far as application of these technologies are concerned. Unfortunately for Xerox, its focus was more for research and business application, and not for the mass consumer market. And as for Linux in specific, my perception of it is that it was something like Unix, but created for use on personal computers because someone had enough of Microsoft’s buggy products.

From my point of view, if Apple or any of the iFreak faithful of Steve Jobs Stiff Drop was to claim Apple as a technology innovator, it will be as good as Nazi Germany claiming credit for the rocket when all it did was find application for it in warfare, while it was the Chinese who invented it and the Americans who put several men on the moon with it.

I’ll still stand by my comment.

Random Discourse – Macintosh and Apple Products

I ‘have been a PC’ since my first PC/AT Compatible in 1987, and I have witness its progress from DOS to Windows and from Windows running on DOS to Windows 7 today. Back then, installing a new peripheral is a nightmare a it may require one to have some understanding of what are interrupts (IRQ) and I/O address, while manually configuring the peripheral with jumpers. It was a far cry from the true plug and play systems we have today where the BIOS and the OS does everything for you. Few would remember the horror days of ISA and VESA bus before the PCI bus standard was introduced.

I also witness how we progress from slow analog modems connecting to a jumble of BBS, to the broadband modems connecting to the Internet today. Not to mention how Microsoft’s NT server products and its descendants displaced Novell Netware from the corporate world to become the new standard in Local Area Networking.

As such, I have rarely been in touch of any Apple hardware, except in one instance back in 2000 when I had to support 2 companies (one into designing and the other into magazine publishing) as a system integrator. Even then, I had minimal contact with a Mac, as another vendor handles them and my job is simply to coordinate with that vendor. Since I don’t even use any of its products, I wouldn’t have been critical of Apple if not for all those Apple ‘evangelists’ and advertisements disparaging the PC. These people and ads annoy me to no end as they apparently have no touch whatsoever with reality.

FACT: PCs are the real workhorse in the world.

As far as I am concerned, when I stepped into the office, the only machines that is doing much of the real work, are PCs. In fact, in the bank I worked, 100% of the trading activities are done on PCs. There is no Mac in sight. It doesn’t matter the spin doctors in the advertisement firms are using Macs to create those nice ads you see on TV or the Internet, the fact remained that it is probably a PC running the CAD/CAM software designing the machines that produce the Macs, and the building that Apple, Inc is situated may even have been drawn by an architect using Autocad on a PC, while the employees of the bank which Apple does most of its transactions are also using PCs. All of which run on Windows!

FACT: The Mac is not superior in engineering to a PC

For those of you who might not be aware, the PCI-Bus was first introduced on the PC before Apple incorporated it on its Power Macintosh. So now who is disparaging PC as being inferior? Frankly, while Macs may have the allegedly more superior Firewire, it is the PC’s USB standard that dominates and even Macs have some USB ports built in. Meantime, Macs today use Intel processors and so do PCs – which have been using Intel CPUs all these while.

Some argues that it is true that a Mac is superior because the Mac version of the software runs faster and better on a Mac than on the PC. Well, that is a fallacy. Consider this, a game would probably run smoothly on the XBOX but a PC version will never provide the same experience. Consoles are thus superior than PCs since the same game runs faster on them? By no means is that true because the consoles have very specific range of hardware and are specifically designed for that purpose. While a Mac is not designed specifically for a particular purpose, the available range of Macs with limited variation in specifications makes it easy for Apple to optimise code of its OS for these machines. Now consider a PC which is a product of a Sim Lim Square Ah Beng Shop, with parts ordered by an enthusiast with ‘the best components’ he reads about on forums and magazines, or the myriad of so-called ‘state of the art’ PCs and laptops produced by a branded manufacturer. Need I elaborate further?

FACT: The Mac OS is not superior to Windows

Mac users often felt more superior than Windows users. I can still remember the term ‘Windows 95 = Mac 86’ when that version of Windows hit the market, and I have heard remarks as ridiculous as “I can code better with Java on my Mac than on my PC”. Doh!

I will concede that the Mac OS may have more user friendly features considering some of the reviews I have read. But I would disagree those makes it superior to Windows unless those features are something you use constantly, which translates into a remarkable improvement in productivity over time. However, other than the features, is there anything else a Mac User can boast about? In fact, this is my challenge to Apple, let Psystar or anyone put the Mac OS on any machine other than just those Apple make, let it go onto machines with configurations as diverse as those supported by Windows and let us then see how will it holds up!

Stability? I have seen Windows XP machines running for months on end without crashing. Now, take a moment to consider the easily available number of peripherals out there for the PC – display cards, sound cards etc – how of often do you change or add any of these things in a Mac? A bad driver from one of these, or a component with some inherent flaws in the process of manufacturing, can produce a remarkably bad experience for a user. And if you want to talk about Windows vulnerability to exploits, malware and virus, it is of no surprise malware writers worked overtime to exploit Windows when the PC is the real workhorse of the world. After all, that is where it make the most impact. I personally wouldn’t be surprise if Mac users would just double, they would also see an increase in such attacks on their systems.

FACT: The iPhone is nothing great

Yep, nothing great. It first came without an MMS feature, and only after several upgrades of the phone’s OS did Apple finally put that feature in grudgingly. In fact, in earlier versions of the phone you can’t delete individual SMS. You either leave them alone or you delete the entire thread of SMS you have exchanged with a friend. On top of that, for a long time, you can’t use it as a teethered modem. If I am not wrong, you can configure it as a modem over Bluetooth, but if you are using an old Bluetooth dongle then the transmission speed will be atrocious. That’s not mentioning you also can’t transfer a file directly over bluetooth. Yet, all of these features are built into the phone, but denied to the users. Users can gain access to these features only after they ‘jailbreak’ the phone and install third party software which might not be approved – all of which will nullify their warranty.

Can you imagine Toyota building a car that comes with an airbag that you can’t use? Or an anti-lock braking system that you must find an shady mechanical to enable before you can use it? That’s not mentioning that it comes with an internal battery that is not replaceable. Is it a surprise why some of those iPhones explode?

Now, talk about a phone that Apple claims the screen would shatter because the user exerts too much force on it. How preposterous! Remember this, while it only take a touch for one to type on the screen of an iPhone, one needs to actually press the Blackberry Storm’s screen down when typing a message. Now have you see any of Research In Motion’s Blackberry Storm with its SurePress touch screen exploding in the face of its users?

With all of the above, I am convinced that everything about Apple is nothing more than hype. Now, when I also consider also some of Apple’s anti-competition business practices, I continually find myself looking unfavorably on Apple. In fact, do you know you can’t play songs you buy on iTunes anywhere else other than on iTunes or an iPod? Whatever happened to choice? In fact, while I may frown on Palm’s method in impersonating its Palm Pre as an iPod, I find Palm’s intention in providing users with a choice admirable and noble. I could only pray for Palm to find a better method in doing so without bringing itself into conflict with the USB Implementers Forum, a standards group.

Surprisingly, you don’t see people complain about such monopolistic and anti-choice practices from Apple. I shudder to imagine what will happen if Microsoft does something like that. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised that the courts in Europe and the U.S. haul Microsoft in and slaps it with a hefty fine in a jiffy. Talk about double standards.