Prayer answered: Bannon is leaving

Woke up to the news that Steve Bannon has been fired. This is wonderful news. He will do what he wants to do but the White House is not the place for them.

When is Trump going to resign? I would think he would prefer that than get impeached and kicked out.

We are less happy with our employers

Deja Vu for me. I remember day after day as a young executive looking at those people at least 20 years older than me back then. They lived such comfortable lives working out of those rooms and we secretaries to do their chores. If only their boss, the VP wouldn't so demanding they would have succeeded at creating heaven on earth. I am still in touch with this VP who has long retired from the company but none of these self centered managers.

I recognize how at personal or atomic level it could be aggregated into findings in this ST story despite the many years of separation. All the opportunities I had to try new things and learn were mostly driven by this VP but what can one person in a large division do? In the end all of us left for other employers only to discover that by and large we are ruled by happy golf playing bosses who work out of rooms and resist change, only interested in the sweet spot they have navigated themselves into.

It is a different world now. Most of those rooms have been torn down but that basic bo-chap attitude find every opportunity to surface. The only exception was the time I was at a leading Wall Street bank when people like that inevitably got shown the door, where bad luck was also your fault but the bonuses if you can survive was really good and embarrassing if you perform.

SG: Between American and China, an adjustment of course

Standards has been falling at ST and also the SCMP. I was surprised at the writing in this article. Midway I detoured to check who wrote this. It was one of our own veteran journalists, Zuraidah Ibrahim. Her other half is Cherian George, a good writer and incisive thinker. We lost both of them to Hong Kong.

To me this was the most important sentence in the story.

"maturation process" in SG-China relationship.

Ms Ibrahim provided the context for our expulsion of Huang Jing by reminding us of our the expulsion of the first secretary of the US embassy here way back in 1988. Fast forward our relationship with the US strengthened. Ditto what will follow from our action against Huang Jing. In private, Singapore is steering a different direction, not a complete change of course but just as in leaning in more toward the US before, we will be building our relationship with the Chinese more rapidly like we had with the US now. In other words the environment changed, we adapt. Whoever drove the change we ride with the driver. Post Cold War it was the US, now it is China.

This just a game of best friends and better best friends. The focus is on "best" rather than "better". Whoever makes more sense and earned the "better" that country now is China.

It does not mean that our relationship with America will weaken but it does mean there is more growth between us and China vis a vis the Americans. The ball is in America's court when it becomes post Trump to catch up or lose out.

Fake news: ICA fuel tank scanner

I received many copies of this via Whatsapp with some providing more intriguing pictures. This one is the most detailed and "convincing".

Only two of them follow up with messages that the news was fake.

The fake news problem is getting more serious but this is also the moment to get familiar with them and learn to spot them. Some of us are conscientious students but most are either lazy or stupid, swallowing hook, line and sinker.

My worry is that as part of the natural sorting process, the shrewd and the suckers are organized into separate groups. We will have to depend on common members of both groups to keep pointing out such hoaxes to the lazy gullible ones. I have noticed some are just too lazy to learn, always leaning on others to look out for them. To add insult to injury, quite a few even enjoy fake news because they are often juicy and conspiratorial. I have also noticed agnostics and atheists seem to do better.

Changi Airport T4 Open House

Took quite a few photos at the Terminal 4 open house yesterday and reproducing by favourite three here.

Beautiful ornamental orchids line the whole length of the departure hall.

This is not just a picture, it is fully animated between three shows but this one showing how luggage overly creatively handled was wifey's favourite. Good for distracting restless people as they wait for their turn to have their travel credentials and security checked.

The the picture before part of this wall is animated as well. It presented a show of romance between a Peranakan young man and woman who were neighbors. The show ends when the couple got married. 

Mr. Singh wore one of the most beautiful turban I have ever come across :-)

And I just have to add that the temperature was a slightly chilly 22.2C but give me this anytime over the hot weather outside. 

All in it was quite fun.

Halimah running for President

If this is a reserved for Malays only presidential elections, I am not voting for Halimah. I have nothing against her, in fact I like her. It is the PAP that I have a problem with. So if the high court would to rule that only the next PE is a reserved one, I might vote for her.

MTR 10-hour train delay

This is not our MRT but the standard setting HK MTR. I was keen to study the difference between them and us during such an event.

I don't track such things closely enough to compare the potential penalties they face vis a vis our MRT in an incident like this. What is noteworthy though is that they have a much clearer idea of what went wrong. For us, we would simply have said, "signaling fault". With them they explained how three computers controlling the signaling to ensure the tracks are safe had experienced an unprecedented failure, which had not happened in well over ten years. In other words they know their system much better than we know ours. For us, we cannot even anticipate a sliding door coming off its rollers and intermittently tripping the power. Looks like we have a near impossible problem and the solution is to replace many bits of the system gradually until we know the behavior and health of each bit. This will take many years. The government and operators screwed up but never come clean about it and so we also never stopped getting angry with them. I believe HK commuters would mostly just brushed off this rare delay. Here we would asked for heads to roll but of course to no avail. What for? Rolling heads will not solve our problems. The guys now in charge for fixing our system aren't the ones who created the problems in the first place but they are getting all the brickbats.