Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

I almost died laughing when I saw the edited pictures of MM Lee, PM Lee and president SR Nathan on TalkingCock.com. Seriously, go check the two links out.

http://www.talkingcock.com/html/article.php?sid=2414

http://www.talkingcock.com/html/article.php?sid=2427

It’s been a torrid time since I got the keys to my brand new HDB flat almost a month ago. First, me and my wife turned on the water supply only to find water coming out of the kitchen walls and common toilet walls due to a problem with the concealed water pipes. I submitted a defects form and the HDB contractor came to rectify it. And that took a week.

When we turn the water supply back on, we realised the water cistern in the common toilet kept topping itself up. Then we realised that water in the cistern is constantly flowing into the toilet bowl. We had to get the HDB contractors to come to that up as well.

That’s not all. We got a painter to paint the unit and after he was done, he took a stick and poke at parts of the ceiling in each room and to our horror, the plaster started to come off. The painter said he noticed them while he was painting and showed us the problem. The HDB contractor came today and got that one done up.

Guess what happened next? I went into the master bedroom toilet and I heard sounds of water draining into the floortrap. I squatted down and looked around and found two small jets of water coming out of the wall near the ground. I called up the HDB contractor and he came up, inspected and promised to start work tomorrow.

Seriously, I hope this is the last of my troubles. This is certainly not something I am expecting from our million-dollar ministers.

Citigroup economist Chua Hak Bin predicts inflation might hit 4% next year. See this Straits Times article.

In the same article, another economist said 4% is unlikely and predicts slightly over 3% inflation next year.

No matter who is correct, the fact is that these are scary figures. Looks like the 1% increase in CPF rates might not even be enough to hedge against inflation. Scary figures indeed.

If you have not read this letter by a first year law student, please do. It’s quite long but it is worth your time.

I’m terribly disappointed with Thio Li-Ann. When I first heard her talk about her area of specialty in law, I thought that Thio was an excellent academic and lawyer. Her arguments were so well reasoned and convincing. Her subsequent speeches on homosexuality started to cast doubts on my initial assessment of her but this latest speech in Parliament is the last straw.

I must qualify that I still think she’s a pretty darn smart woman. My beef with her is that when she cannot win an argument, she resorts to making unsubstantiated assertions. She starts throwing in loaded and ambiguous terms in an attempt to win the argument. Very disappointing.

Here are 2 more resources that shreds Thio Li-Ann’s arguments as well. I still like the the letter by the law student best but these 2 are also worth a read as well.

http://mollymeek.livejournal.com/168810.html
http://singaporepeasants.blogspot.com/2007/10/nmp-thio-li-ann-and-her-intellectually.html

It’s interesting to see the repeat of a drama that happens from time to time. First, pupils came out of PSLE crying after the mathematics paper. Angry parents start writing to newspapers and ringing up MOE to complain. The examination board chief has to come out and say that the paper was no more difficult than other years.

In the first place, why are the students crying? It’s obviously because parents and teachers are stressing them. Schooling is no longer fun anymore. I don’t mean to say that it was just fun when I was in primary school but I remember grades never seemed so important. In fact, I remember always being sent out of the class and having my exercise books flung out of the classroom door because I often did not do homework.

I honestly don’t recall how PSLE was like. All I remember was that I couldn’t wait for the PSLE to be over because it meant I could go and play soccer everyday. In fact, I think soccer was more important than my PSLE. I know I was a naughty boy back then and perhaps I should have been more disciplined but hey, I think I enjoyed my primary school days.

Of course, I do not advocate such naughty behaviour. I probably will give my own kid an earful for that. What I think parents should do is to tell kids to try their best and if the paper comes out to be really ‘difficult’, assure the kids that it will not be a problem. There are years where papers have been difficult but students still got into good secondary schools. If everyone does so badly, all the good schools are going to close shop because nobody can qualify!

Chill. Things will work out fine.

I wasn’t expecting to comment further on my main bugbear with the CPF changes but a letter published in Today Online changed that. It was a letter by Dr Vincent Chia who pointed out some statistics that the government should take note of.

I have not had the time to verify whether the information cited by Chia was true but it is certainly plausible that it is the rich who can expect to live longer compared to the poor. Overall life expectancy might be increasing to 85 and beyond but who are the ones living to such ripe old age? According to Chia’s letter, epidemiological data from America and Britain has shown privileged groups enjoy longer lifespan.

Chia even cites a local study which shows that in 1999, “43.5 per cent of the old-old (defined as aged 85 years and above) live in HDB four-room or larger flats. In comparison, 29.1 per cent of old-old Singaporeans live in HDB three-room flats, while the remaining 11 per cent live in HDB one- or two-room flats”. The figures add up to 83.6% and the missing percentages are probably those who live in private housing (Census 2000 housing data put the percentage of Singaporeans living in private housing to be around 12%).

It is possible that in future, increasing numbers of those age 85 and above will come from upper middle-class and above, and these folks have the ability (in theory) to take care of their themselves. These are the folks who are likely to live longer as well. So, it could be likely that the nice sounding “longevity insurance” could end up benefiting those who are more well-off.

Of course, this is not the main basis on my objection to the annuities issue (see earlier entry) but it is interesting food for thought that the rich (million dollar ministers, wealthy bankers, lawyers and doctors) are more likely to live long enough to enjoy an extra few hundred dollars of spare change every month while the poorer folks find themselves in a permanent resting spot in a columbarium.

I think our Singapore Tourism Board now have another piece of publicity material to use when selling Singapore to would-be tourists.

Reuters: Anime figurine protesters meet real police

Mr Brown: Singapore police sends 4 riot buses to deal with Ultraman?

Welcome to the first country in the world where riot police were on standby to arrest figurines. Uniquely Singapore, indeed.

If you have not read The Online Citizen’s latest entry, I recommend reading it.

In what I think is a very funny development to “bicycle politics”, The Online Citizen found out (with screenshots as evidence) that Young PAP has quietly dropped (it’s obviously not quiet anymore) cycling from it’s events calendar. One can only speculate why the guys at Young PAP decided on such a move.

This little episode is funny on another count. Vivian Balakrishnan said this not too long ago:

The most potent impact that the new media will have on politics is that, politicians will find it impossible to lie in the future. The truth will always be out there, because somewhere, someone has the facts, or has seen something, and will publish it. Fortunately for us in Singapore , we have run a clean system, and hence have nothing to hide. (Source: Ministry of Information, Communication and Arts)

I wonder if Vivian is now wishing he never said that. To be fair, we have to keep in mind that technically, the YPAP guys are not politicians, at least not yet. However, it’s still embarrassing that the party leadership said one thing and the youth wing decides to do the direct opposite.

Since we are on the topic of exposition, check out Wikiscanner, a web service built specially to track who’s been editing what on Wikipedia. Wired has a list of the salacious editing of Wikipedia entries on certain organisations, and the editing was traced back to computer networks of those organisations.

The organisations appear to be mainly U.S. or Europe based organisations, though. I wonder if any local organisations have been sneakily doing some Wikipedia edits as well.

The following statement by Ho Peng Kee is probably the talk of the town now:

“If you listened very carefully Mr Low, I don’t know whether his hearing aid is with him because he wears one, I said there is a greater potential for law and order problems. You may be well-behaving, but there may be other people whom you come across when you cycle who may stop you, may want to debate with you and that may attract a crowd, and therefore will result in problems the police want to avoid.”

I don’t need to intend to add more fuel to the fire but I just can’t help but feel a tinge of double standards. I do think that there wouldn’t be an issue if it was the PAP instead of the WP applying for a permit to hold an outdoor cycling event. Nevermind that the permit was not granted, but for a minister of state to respond to a question on why the permit was denied with the above quote is certainly baffling, to say the least. It really smacks of bullying.

A case all political parties are equal, but some are more equal than others?

I was chatting with a friend and he raised, in my opinion, an extremely valid point about how many bloggers, in discussing social issues, usually do so on behalf of the less privileged because most bloggers are probably of a relatively high socio-economic background. There is a lack of online participation coming from those who are really under-privileged.

It is a fair statement to say that most bloggers are of a certain level of socio-economic status. To be able to afford Internet access, have the technical know-how to maintain a blog as well as to be able to express oneself coherently using the written word certainly says something about the background of the typical blogger. However, I do think that it is perhaps not exactly a bad thing that bloggers are speaking on behalf of the less privileged.

This is because those who are “less privileged” are most likely not able to express themselves eloquently enough. Of course, that should not be an excuse not to participate but I think that these underprivileged group might think of themselves as being too inferior and not dare to participate as a result. Whatever the case is, their voice has to be heard, be through themselves or through people who are more privileged than them.

And of course, if we maintain the perspective that the underprivileged should be speaking up for themselves, then our parliament should reserve some places for the coffeeshop uncle, the taxi driver and the refuse collector. I think that would be really interesting (and my idealist streak will say that’s real representativeness).