Yesterday I met this taxi-driver who reminded me how fortunate I am to be able to get a place in an university. Not that I needed one, but some taxi-drivers like to talk when they drive. I believe it helps to give the image that they have godly driving skills and are able to drive at break-neck speeds on the AYE without concentrating on the road.
Drivers need car insurances, and passengers need life insurances.
He was talking about how he couldn't get a job after years of working at some construction company and got retrenched even though he has so much experience. I was suggesting that he could try SIM, since he looked like he was in his 20s, and I assumed he was just an unfortunate poly grad.
That was when he told me he was 34, with 3 kids, and only managed to study up to Sec 1. He had many certificates of all the courses he had attended during those years at the company, including courses on "fork-lifting", "crane-operation"...
Ouch.
Indeed, the government has encourage us to "upgrade" ourselves by attending courses to learn stuff that will make us more "useful". But I do not believe this is what they were thinking about when they said it.
My impression of what they mean by "upgrade" had been to learn things that cannot be learnt easily through a day of On-Job-Training, a.k.a. job orientation. There is a vast difference between learning how to fully utilise MS Excel and a cash register. (Well, if there is a course on fork-lifting then what's wrong with a course on cash register operations?)
It's like making a librarian-to-be attend a course on how to manage a library. I'm sure there are such courses somewhere, in the U.S. if not Singapore. They probably squeeze 50 bucks out of you and, in exchange, teach you how to avoid paper-cuts in 5 days of 2-hour lessons.
"And tomorrow, we'll show you how to wrap plasters around the cut when you do get a paper-cut..."
Okay, I admit there are many people who find it difficult to learn things some of us take for granted. But some things seem so simple I cannot believe external professionals are required to teach them to employees. It can't be too hard to find an older veteran of the job to show the newbies the ropes.
Maybe it's a new company, then there's the need for external professionals. Or maybe they got new equipments. Fork-lifters with many new functions? LOL! Hmm... Then what I don't understand is how he expect to get jobs with such certificates. It may make him better than foreign workers, but their incredibly low wages more than make up for their lack of experience. And those guys will kill to work for peanuts.
And for him to get an O-level cert and then a poly diploma is not much better. By the time he's done, he's in his 40s and who wants a 40-year-old poly grad with experience in nothing but construction work and taxi-driving?
Sad. With 3 kids, I do not see how he can make ends meet when they're older. No doubt, he won't be able to support them if they ever make it to any universities, and though insurances may help, it won't be easy for him to pay the premiums in the years to come.
And on the subject of foreign workers, I once knew this Indian air-conditioner technician who's got a diploma. How can we compete with such over-qualified people who are willing to work for less than a thousand, with no year-end bonus and welfare stuff?
And China is worse. Not only do they have such people, they are able to produce goods at obscenely low prices too. Some may not understand the depth of this problem, and I can only recommend playing Civilization IV(or I, II, III, for that matter) to fully comprehend the power of massive numbers.
In the Civilization series, I find that if I can create as many cities as I can in the beginning, while ignoring just about everything but avoiding bankruptcy, I can prosper like Bill Gates with his Windows 95 at the end. I do not bother to build any armies except for a few units to protect me from barbarians.
When anyone dares to attack me, I simply put all my cities' production to military units. Yes, they may take a few cities at first, but my overwhelming production rate can produce an obscene army in a few turns. Nothing can kill me, but I can kill anyone, if I feel like waging wars.
There is no way Singapore can compete with the PRC in the future, when it prospers enough to be considered a developed country. What stops China's cheap goods from taking over the markets of many countries, including the U.S., is that they all have quotas on Chinese goods.
For now, Chinese goods are still notoriously unreliable, especially since the authorities are unable to fully control the quality. It is not unheard of for their factories to use toxic dyes that are banned in most countries in the clothes they make. Frequent checks before they ship the stuff you ordered are necessary if you want to import goods from China and still maintain your reliability.
But no one can resist the low prices they offer! When the prices are low enough, people are willing to take chances even when the consequences are really bad. A few months ago in a Taiwanese news report, they interviewed a Chinese factory where they package pork taken from pigs that have died from diseases. Such pork are really cheap, and many restaurants use it.
Would you stop eating there when you've read this? Of course not. You'd take the chance when you see the prices of the food there.
Another time they interviewed a factory that makes "wine" from water, grape juice and industrial alcohol. This wine was sold at less than s$0.50 each! That's cheaper than mineral water! And they were packaged in boxes that looked exactly the same as those you'd see in wine shops.
If someone offers this sort of wine for sale at decently low prices in Singapore, anyone without experience in wine would fall for it.
Singaporeans cannot compete with such unscrupulous people, trusting as we are in the clean environment we grow up in. Someday when more of them expand their businesses outwards, they will bring their ways with them and push this sort of low cunning to a whole new level.
Someday in the future when they are rich enough, they will no longer have problems in reliability. What then?
We need to learn about corruption. Not legalised corruption, but the illegal sort. We need to learn to bribe cops, and local cops need to learn to accept bribes. Our authorities need to be bias towards stingy companies, and suck up to the richer ones. Bigger corporations need to find ways to monopolise the markets to some extent, and let the smaller fishes die.
PAP needs to get fundings from more private companies, especially oil companies, not just from the current sources. We need to drive in the opposite lane once in a while. Someone need to give the local triads a boost in the entertainment industry. And we need a porn industry.
Students need to learn to smoke weed. Condoms should be sold in schools. Ecstasy should be made more accessible to the public. Alcohol should be legally sold to anyone of any age, but minors should be banned from drinking. I need my kids to go downstairs to buy beer for me, and not drink it for me on the way up.
Smoking should be made legal anywhere. I mean, you get the same sort of shit from having one-night-stands, yet no one's making a fuss about it and creating gross posters on the dangers of STDs! Shit, I want to see advertisements of syphilis-infected vaginae on TV! Let my kids see what they'll get if they stick their manhood in too many holes.
We need Soylent Green.
No comments:
Post a Comment