Victorinox for JC

Bought the daughter a Victorinox yesterday for the next phase of her school life. In a matter of weeks she will go to JC like her elder sister before her.

Cost us $119 and I wonder what the future price would be given what had happened to the CHF.

The stickers on the door reminds me of the times when she was a kid. Although I disliked it, I have never removed them. It is just my little personal version of being far seeing. I decided what was unsightly would be nostalgic and beautiful over time.

I am no artist but in my personal way I have captured the passage of time.

10 years as PM: Miscue on cost of living

The knee jerk reaction from many reading this is that the PM and his ministers are out of touch because they live separate lives from us, which they never lacked anything especially money. May be they lack time with the family, but so do we.

Go back to basics which he ought to know better than most of us running the economy successfully for the short term.

In life, you grow or you begin to die. Even academics must publish or perish and the armed forces need to constantly upgrade themselves to fight wars they never hope will come. NGOs are different. They succeed when they are no longer needed because they have achieved their aims. Does Singapore want to be an NGO? I am not kidding because some of us undervalue the primacy of economic growth to sustain everything we do here.

Cost of living complaint is nothing but the tangible feedback to the more nebulous concept of growth. The average fellow thought in unimaginative and simple terms which regularly fail to capture the full meaning of what his heart meant. Simply put, people here and everywhere else want to grow and in such a way that the ceiling is so high they don't even need to worry about hitting it. America attracts immigrants by the hordes because there are many pockets of such opportunities. Not all offer monetary rewards.

In economic terms, we can look at it in both ways as us growing to the point when we hit the limits of growth and begin to experience zero sum games and also diminishing returns. Therefore we need to find new niches and many of them will not be financially and material resource based. But before we move on to any of these new areas, you cannot have a starting line where people see themselves are belonging to winners or losers. That is why so many here envy the Swedish example but never bother to assess if it is practical here. The message if the PM still don't get it is we want a more equal society but without its uncompetitive drawbacks which would make us equal but poor.

Of course the PM and his ministers if they think within this economic box, the problem cannot be solved. You have to make everyone happy to begin to explore new niches and start the game all over again, otherwise they will remain myopic and fight for and protect their share of this small pie. Keep with this for I don't know how much longer and Singapore must go down.

We mustn't have have Socialism with Capitalistic characteristics. We must have Capitalism with Socialistic features in order that we can move on to explore brave new worlds and grow.

10 years as PM: Assessing Opposition MPs

S-pen marked this on my Note 4 this morning from today ST. The PM was commenting on the quality of opposition MPs. I disagree with him because after a while you can tell that the opposition MPs are better than many of his party's MPs. I can't even recall many faces and names of PAP MPs! If you make no impact with me, as far as I am concern you don't exist and is irrelevant. On the other hand I can identify all opposition MPs, NCMPs and many NMPs.

What we have in Parliament today is unlike in 1955. The PAP government is a world class government (but not parliament), so it was easy for LKY and the two others to make short work of the government of the day. It is a totally different situation today. The government is among the best in the world and is not easy to check but nevertheless is nowhere near perfect to be left without check and balance.

I hate this sort of occasional convenient arguments from the PM. Whilst he could persuade quite a few people, there is also a substantial group which can see through this. I bet the number of perceptive voters is growing over time too. Make good honest arguments than easy convenient ones. Not only does it cuts not ice with some of us, but eventually on social media it makes your supporters echoing you look really stupid especially when they get imaginative and brainlessly elaborate your point.

So they should learn from Deng and seek the truth from facts. The WP admitted to the quality of the PAP government which is unthinkable in Westminster type adversarial politics. But this it the truth which they built on and score victories. If you build on falsehood you build on shifting sands and eventually collapse.

Highly intelligent, the PAP sadly has no political wisdom and my be even eroding integrity.

Love of Money: Boy who came back from Heaven

I remember this book with a different cover; a boy with outstretched arms against a yellow background. I got my copy from the NLB eLibrary but never got round to reading beyond the first few pages because though I didn't smell a rat there was a faint hint of one.

Turned out the whole thing was one big lie.

These evangelicals were more interested in the money they could make touting this book than anything else. It has now stopped because the truth has emerged in a powerful way and they simply can't continue selling it. Otherwise I bet they will keep mining profits with this one.

Their God is Money. It is the God of many. It is also the popular God that is worshipped by loving action than loud mouthful praise which they leave for the God of their Bibles.

In other words, they were two timers. I have more respect for the more honest single timing money worshiper.

NUS UTown food court experience

Visited the daughter at UTown this evening and had dinner there. The prices are better if we use her matriculation card.

We got a place at the edge of the food court which afforded us an excellent view of the field below.

Overall this is a nice place. Wifey and I never imagined something like this would materialize at NUS when were students there. In the 80s you usually see and hear local voices but at this food court you would be hard put to hear them. Instead beside the familiar mainland Chinese tongue there were languages I couldn't really make out other than they were Asian. So where are the Singaporeans or at least the Malaysians among them?

PM: A decade on the job

The PM unequivocally admitted his government failure to provide adequate infrastructure for our needs is most welcomed. However I am still disquieted by the plans to house 6.9 million as per the PWP. Sure it is a planning number but it wouldn't be when the time comes. It will be real numbers.

For the civil servants and ministers to show that they have maximized assets, they will figure all sorts of ways to top up to 6.9 million population if the capacity is created. As always when they build too many flats they also find all sort of ways to sell them. It is just how they think and act and this cannot change until they first assure us they will not indulge this habit.

Foresight is difficult but my daughter's essay revealed some of its secrets. For me, I have lowered my expectations of this government because their ability to see far is quite limited. Just manage risk well and most times the foresight deficit will take care of itself. As I observed repeatedly, they can't even do this bit well, so please don't sell me your foresight.

Don't pay too much attention to those scenario planning stuff. It was made of a world which no longer exists. It had failed to deliver and provided policy makers with a false sense of knowing the future.

And always remember, everything costs money but money is not everything.

Our lesson: Tiger eats the Swiss Central Bank

The SNB shocking depegging of the Franc from the Euro caused massive losses to many especially the small guy.

Many hedge funds got slaughtered too because the smart money cannot be smart when it is the market right?

I was clueless for a while since I had duly forgotten about the peg.

To me the SNB tried to get off the tiger it had ridden for the last few years and got mauled and eaten by it. This is a massive screw up and will inflict lasting damage to the Swiss. Meanwhile their exports just became totally uncompetitive over night. Rolex, Patek Philippe etc., might still sell some but Swatch and perhaps Victorinox are in trouble. I just had a Toblerone after lunch. May be add that one too if it comes from the Alps.

The Swiss have certainly lost their way. I wonder if they even knew they were riding a tiger and those who knew never imagine they would be so crazy to get off it.

If the ECB prints money, I am afraid the SNB must also do the equivalent. Once you have decided to go down this path, you must go all the way. It is like joining the triad, you can't get out any time you like.

It is too late now.

I hope this never happen to Singapore because we have also developed similar bad habits as the Swiss. We want to ride the Tiger and also get off and on as and when we like. Luckily for us the Tiger was busy with other matters but one day we will get mauled like the Swiss if we don't know well enough what we are doing.

Singapore cannot mortgage what it is to be Singaporean and still remain Singaporean. The voters grasp this fact better than the PAP.

Printing Francs is absolutely un-Swiss. So they decided to be Swiss like again and remove the peg and trigger a disaster. One day we will also wake up and realize that we have to make some very un-Singaporean choices after a long series of un-Singaporean choices ("money most important") which our leaders thought were worth it. What happens then? Is it already too late for us?

Update: 10:30 pm

Just read this by Paul Krugman. Very similar thinking  but coming from a different perspective. He was thinking of America's interest and me Singapore.