Shit! Cutting their deficits by US$1.1 trillion over 10 years??! Those guys don't sound impressed, but I am! If that's true, they must be cutting off a limb or something. That's an average drop of a hundred billion USD annually.
In addition, they're also cutting military spendings by US$78 billion over 5 years. Overall, these cuts sound like they exceed all the other cuts that were proposed before.
If this goes through, there will be a lot of unhappy people. I bet many will be using "wrong budget cuts" or "spending in the wrong areas" as excuses for not supporting him.
And people are saying the political situation in Singapore can't get any worse and SDA is a possible replacement for the PAP. Seriously, how can our situation be bad when our leaders are good enough to avoid all debts and even accrue a huge buffer in the treasury? Are we supposed to take that for granted?
As for the SDA, the news about the split means 2 undeniable facts:
1) Their leaders can't control the alliance and make it work together.
2) The members can't keep their mouth shut about internal troubles.
Unfortunately, point 1 alone is enough for me not to vote for them. The logic is obvious. If they can't even control a political alliance, how can I expect them to control an entire government? Point 2 only makes things worse. Do you ever hear the PAP announcing their disputes? Did they discuss, for example, that anti-homosexual Young PAP blogger who typed that insanely homophobic blog years ago?
No, because when you're a leader, you need to appear confident. To do that, you need to keep your collective mouth sealed about certain things. It gives everyone the impression that things are under control.
If you still don't understand, then think about the officers in the military. Are they supposed to share their troubles with their men? No. To do that would reveal a weakness, and weakness does not garner respect. Without respect, an officer is impotent. Same with a government.
TBH I'm not exactly a PAP supporter. I've never voted for them because there's no reason to vote for anyone atm. Give me a better choice and I might get off my chair and vote for it. But right now, such a party is non-existent.
I feel that it's unhealthy that the general mentality of Singaporeans is that the PAP is bad. I've never heard anyone say anything good about them, yet everybody I know has complained about something regarding the party.
At the moment it's sad. But in the long-term, it's bad. Must they go through a period of chaos before they appreciate what they now have? I don't want that, not when the possibility of me finding a job in Canada after graduation is so slim. Of course that's not my main reason but let's just leave it at that. I wonder if anyone will quote this paragraph in the future and deliberately make misleading statements about me. Typing this is evidence that I currently have little desire to dabble in politics.
Nevertheless I think we will see bad times in the future when we vote in some inexperienced noobs from the opposition, which we definitely will if this mentality goes on. Some Singaporeans even use the reason that our Ministerial salaries being too high as a reason for voting for the Opposition.
That makes no sense whatsoever! The complete absence of sense pisses me off so much!
Do they expect the Opposition members to voluntarily cut their own salaries to more decent levels (roughly 66% if, say, one cuts his S$1,570,000 to Donald Tsang's S$516,000) if they ever become ministerial-grade MPs?
The matter of ministerial pay is no longer debatable. No sane non-desperate politician will ever promise to do that. It's done and that's that. Now we can only judge whether they're worth the money. Of course they're not, but how close are they?
Nobody in Singapore has better training than LHL, no matter how bad he is compared to his dad. After all, he has had a lifetime of personal training from LKY himself. Qualification-wise, he's got the best certificate there is regarding politics in Singapore - his frickin birth cert. Experience-wise, he's certainly got more of it in regards to controlling a Cabinet than anyone in the Opposition. Even if he doesn't have the calling, he's got the training.
I'm not saying PAP's great. Heck, I don't think any of them MPs are even close to being worth their pay, but I'm definitely saying they're currently the best we have, unfortunately.
And we should not take everything for granted. I know it's hard since we all grew up in such a nice environment, but people should pay more attention to international news and see how bad things can get. I wonder if any of those guys commenting about local issues in the various news websites or forums even paid attention to recent events in Thailand, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.
That's how bad things can get, how incapable governments can be, and they aren't even the worst-case scenarios. For those, you've got to study some history, like pre-1789 France. Let them eat cake, eh? (I know, there's no evidence that she ever said it.) People should be grateful for what they already have.
做人要知足，因为知足常乐。Translation: to be happier in life, we need to understand limits and be satisfied with having enough. Not the best translation, still think that can be improved upon.
Anyway, I guess Singapore is proof that money can't buy happiness. Next time you need to teach that to your kids, just tell him/her to look around himself/herself, assuming you're Singaporean.
PS if you're a Singaporean and you've never thought about what I've mentioned above, you ought to be ashamed that you need a non-native Singaporean to tell you these.
How does one make kuay tiao edible again after leaving it in the fridge overnight?
If you haven't tried it before, it becomes dry and brittle after a night in the cold. This cannot be reversed by putting it in the microwave.
Does this mean leftover kuay tiao cannot be saved??
The menu theme song of Civ 4 has just won a Grammy award. A piece of game music won a Grammy award. The world is changing, ladies and gentlemen, the world is changing.
Meanwhile, another form of mobile gaming begins! A PS phone, Xbox Live on smart phones, everything is going mobile these days, as expected. Whether non-mobile consoles will go extinct is still hard to predict. It all depends on how powerful (eg graphics) and mobile (eg battery life, weight) these handphone consoles will get in the future.
Maybe someday we will get public phone chargers, if they can ever shorten the recharge time dramatically. Maybe they can be placed like public washrooms - on every floor in malls and inside of every restaurant. And they'd charge money per Watt-second or something, kinda like public phones.
Malaysia sounds like a bad place to do business in. Then again, it always has been. It's not just the organized crime. All the low costs and rents are bullshit once you consider the amount of bribes necessary to keep your goods intact. Even in the malls, the security guards require bribes if you set up a store there. Worse, you can't just pay them off with one huge bribe each year. It's been tried, and convenient amnesia happened.
Transport sucks too. Even after she ended her business venture in Malaysia, my mum was never able to find a transport company that didn't occasionally steal something from her cargo. The problem is that there's no way to prove it unless you stay in Malaysia to check the goods when they arrive in the country and then again immediately when they drop them off at the destination, so the police can't do anything about it.
Actually the problem about transport happens in Singapore too, but we were fortunate enough to find a trustworthy transport guy. That's primarily because my father was the one who encouraged him to set up his own transport business and became one of his biggest clients. His fees aren't the cheapest but it's worth the safety. Cheaper services have been tried but few ever leave our goods alone once they're loaded into their vans. The other safer ones, usually owned by locals, are significantly more expensive than this guy's. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he charges his other clients more.
It might have to do with the ease with which our goods can be stolen, fenced and smuggled. I don't think any customs officer ever gets suspicious about jackets. The smugglers can easily put them on and say the air conditioners in their vehicles are too powerful.
Playing Alternativa. It's... pretty bad. It's got a good concept but the execution has much room for improvement.
Alternativa is a point-and-click adventure game similar to Broken Sword and Monkey Island. Set in a dystopic future that reminded me of Soylent Green and 1984, it started with a disgruntled worker who was unceremoniously informed he had been laid off only when he arrived for work. Hence began his search for the Resistance.
The graphics are poor but not ugly IMO. However, the voice-acting and scripts were horrendous. They could have spared that cash and just used subtitles instead.
Most of the puzzles were quite simple and logical other than one exception that required trial and error, although it only had 30 (6*5) to 120(6*5*4) combinations according to the hint.
The game's not popular at all in the English-speaking world, judging from the number of walkthroughs available on Google. There's one written version (but incomplete) and one series of videos on Youtube. As such, it was pretty hard to find an answer quickly whenever I was stuck.
The other day in the Chinese Reading and Comprehension class the lecturer mentioned 孔子 (Confucius) and 庄子 since we were on the topic of 散文, or essays. Speaking of 孔子, it's important to pronounce the 子 normally because to pronounce it lightly ( 轻声) would give it a whole different meaning - a hole. Saying you respect Confucius is quite different from saying you respect a hole.
Same with 老子. If 子 is pronounced lightly, these two characters together mean "me". If pronounced normally, it's the name of an ancient philosopher and author of the 道德经. How hard you pronounce the 子 in "道德经是老子写的。" can mean the difference between "The Tao Te Ching was written by Laozi," and "The Tao Te Ching was written by me."
Anyway he was telling us about how different these 2 men were. If you want to be successful in life, you should study Confucian teachings. If you fail, you should study 庄子。
The reason is in the philosophies of these 2 wise men. Confucius believed in rigid rules, in stereotypes and probably in racism. Anyone who didn't behave the way a normal Chinese should was a barbarian to him. All cultures not from China was not culture. When one of his disciples returned after staying several years somewhere far to the south, he found him to be barbaric in the aforementioned sense and treated him as one, ie he got rid of him.
However rigidity and, hence, good discipline usually do produce more successful people. This is why his works are still famous today.
But when you fail and you're feeling down, you read the teachings of 庄子because to put it simply, he believed in letting nature take its course, or 顺其自然. What will be will be, que sera sera, so just relax and go with the flow.
It's funny and it's true.
No comments:
Post a Comment