DIY tshirts – part 2

Any critiques? For these as well as for the four previous ones.

Did he say that?

http://siewkumhong.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-many-portions-of-help-sir.html

At the MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, YOUTH AND SPORTS (9 March 2007)

Dr Lily Neo: Sir, I want to check with the Minister again when he said on the strict criteria on the entitlement for PA recipients. May I ask him what is his definition of “subsistence living”? Am I correct to say that, out of $260 per month for PA recipients, $100 goes to rental, power supply and S&C and leaving them with only $5 a day to live on? Am I correct to say that any basic meal in any hawker centre is already $2.50 to $3.00 per meal? Therefore, is it too much to ask for just three meals a day as an entitlement for the PA recipients?

Dr Vivian Balakrishnan: How much do you want? Do you want three meals in a hawker centre, food court or restaurant?

Is it too much to expect him to adddress the question and not resort to sarcasm when he doesn’t have an answer? Anyway, if someone is having financial difficulty surviving on $260 a day, giving them an increase of $1 a day will hardly make a difference considering the cost of living here.

DIY tshirts.

Not Sparta. This is SINGAPORE!!!!

Original image by Frank Miller.
Content from CNN.

Victoria – The Place To Be.

With an average temperature of 11degrees, Melbourne really was THE place to be. Permernant air-conditioning is something Singaporeans fantasize about in our sweltering heat. Almost all days were bright and sunny, which were good for me, but very bad for the farmers there as Australia is in the midst of a long drought.

There are lots of stuff to do there, especially since i was there during the annual Comedy Festival, although all year round there are other activites like F1 racing and Food and Wine Fair to name a couple. However, having high wages and because to protectionist inclinations, everything there is rather expensive compared to home. 4-5 times more expensive after currency translation, thus impeding the budget travellers from savouring the full flavour of the city and surrounds. Compared to Orchard Rd here, the city there is tame and small, however i would gladly choose them as first as although having only a few malls, the majority of shops are independant and unique. Rather than have the same brands everywhere, the sheer variety and atypicality of it all is a winner.

Read Lord of the Flies?

Our very own multinational hawker stall.

This place claims to be the real thing, with an article of Melbourne newspaper, The Age, featuring them taped to the window. There’s also a Singapore Chom Chom around as well.

Croft Institute. Really cool laboratory themed bar which is located in…

this dark and dodgy alley lined with trashbins and broken glass.

Melbourne is a place where every alley holds a hidden bar. If it weren’t for word or mouth and publications, i really wonder how people find out about these places. There was another one i dropped by, St Jerome’s, which unfortunately i didn’t get a picture of. It was shabby themed, such that it looked like the owners just threw a few old wooden benches and tables there and boarded up the perimeter to create the “bar”. Or maybe it wasn’t intentionally themed at all.

Croft Institute – 21 Croft Alley
St Jerome – 7 Caledonian Lane

Flinders Street Train station.

South Melbourne townhall.

Melbourne Central. Shopping mall built over an old still-running train station.

The architecture there is beautiful. Victorian, neo-gothic, renaissance whatever. You don’t need to know specifics to admire the works. Just take a walk around and there are plenty of conservation buildings, inclulding a public bathhouse and underground toilets along the streets from ages ago, both of which are still operational. Melbourne Central (the third photo) has a cinema called the half-pipe, which replaces the normal seats with bean bags. How cool is that?

Mackenzie Falls in the Grampians, 250km away from the city.

Beware of cliffs, falling, and family life.

Grampians National Park, 6 Singapore lengths away from the city. Thankfully a minibus drove me to there and up the mountain ranges. Beautiful scenery and the waterfall are the highlights of the place. As well as a bit of Australian history lessons included.

This is graffiti there. Believe it. Such art would earn a few strokes of the cane and a jail term here. Is it any wonder we struggle to produce arts and culture?

Eggs Benedict.

This is worth a mention. Caffe Panette at 144 Cecil St South Melbourne. Great food and a nice laid back atmosphere. Also, Il Dolce Freddo at 116 Lygon Street in Carlton has the best gelato ever. A$4 for 2 huge scoops. And Koko Black, which has outlets sprinkled around town, has really yummy chocolate items. A$5.50 for the most filling ice chocolate drink you will ever have.

Scaryness.

http://www.smu.edu.sg/news_room/press_releases/2007/20070420.asp

The Singapore Management University (SMU) has received a record number of 12,911 applications for admission, making the university nine times oversubscribed.

More than half (54%) of the applicants are ‘A’ level students.

Quality of students applying to SMU this year has also risen with more than one third (39%) of ‘A’ level applicants scoring ABB or better in their results.

Tabulating to achieve the data that 11% of applicants get in, and 21% of applicants got ABB or better. Postulating that grades are the sole measure of entry, the majority of the student population is going to be frighteningly good. What fun (and definately stressful) uni is going to be.

Return.

After my 2 week break, and what a holiday it was, i’ll finally be back Sunday morning. Back to Spore. Ugh.

Whatever. I will have a short write-up on Melbourne and the sights after i catch a breather from the very long flight and transit.

See ya guys soon.

On fairness

The debate will never end, for everyone wants more for themselves and want less of what others get more than them. Even though people do understand the difference in levels, they do still wish to see a limit to what they do not get, as well as would they wish to continually increase their own takings. But one thing thats for sure, this huge gap is not contained to the public service alone.

I retain the percentage form instead of converting to absolute values as obviously those who put more money in will get a higher amount. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Blankfein got a bonus of US$53.4million. Stockholders got 0.7% of what they had invested. Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack got US$40million. Shareholders 1.3%. Merrill Lynch CEO US$18.5million, shareholders 1.5%. (source:Bloomberg)

People who have put their faith and their savings into these entities to help them get capital to expand and utilise are getting just a minute fraction of what the topdog is collecting. These firms can easily double what they are giving out without causing so much as a dent to the coffers, Goldman Sachs earned US$9.4billion, rewarding shareholders for their investments. But as usual its not a fair world.

So it seems SingGov Pte Ltd is just another huge corporation, while you and i, as well as our parents and grandparents, mere shareholders who have put our lives into this place, only to share a small part of the gains, while top level management is bountifully rewarded.

300 is a chick flick

http://www.edmw.sg/viewtopic.php?p=793403#793403

Smoke alert!

No such time as ‘good’ time or ‘bad’ time: Swee Say
Labour chief says upcoming ministerial pay hike is timely

AMID the ongoing debate over the impending ministerial pay rise, labour chief Mr Lim Swee Say is confident that more Singaporeans “will come to accept and realise” that the move is for their benefit.

“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve continued to reach out … to explain to the ground. I would say that … the workers understand that if you look at Singapore today, we are an economy with one of the highest employment rates and, at the same time, one of the lowest unemployment rates,” said Mr Lim, who is also the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office.

When asked if it was right to increase the ministers’ salaries, as the income gap continues to widen and with the Goods and Services Tax set to rise in July, Mr Lim added that “time is of the essence”.

Said Mr Lim: “We must continue this process of attracting the best talents possible, people who care to join the Government, the civil service. The process must continue in a non-stop manner.”

He added: “So in other words, there’s no such time as a good time, there’s no such time as a bad time, we just have to do it all the time.”

Yes, i’m sure we all will come to accept and realise that everything is costing more due to the GST+ERP+COE+PARF+trasport fare+PUB increases, that we are getting less than we did before the downturn even though the economy is strong now, and that $290 is enough for most in the Public Assistance schemes to live on (source: Dr Vivian Balakrishnan). We know that we need to pay the best to get the brightest talents to lead our great nation, which means paying higher than any other superpower including USA and Britian (source: Wikipedia here & here), and that we need them most in times of hardship which is why we give them salary raises during recessions while workers get pay cuts. We understand that one of the reasons for paying so well is beacause they only have a 5-year term after which they are subject to the elections, where they will have to campaign if there are any contestants in the first place, and although wielding the estate-upgrading carrot, they might actually lose! We know that our critisism of the pay increase is due to envy and that we are “green eyed monsters” (source: Nicholas Lazarus). And we have to give them a raise now, as there is never a need not to attract talent, unlike budget handouts to the people which are only given once, and in line with tax increases. We want the best people, who have money as their first priority to lead us, and if we’re lucky, the heart as well. And of course, with pearls of wisdom like “we are an economy with one of the highest employment rates and, at the same time, one of the lowest unemployment rates,”, we really do need better talent.