All residential properties will be 99 years

Someone commented that the most effective measure to bring down property prices will be to convert all residential properties to 99 year lease. No more freehold, no more 999 years leases. Such a scenario or idea will send shivers down the spines to the landlords, the rich and powerful that have hoarded multiple freehold properties to last till perpetuity. Their ambition was to protect their wealth, to continue to be theirs longer than the life of dynasties that do not last a couple of centuries.



The ground rule has been designed by the rich and powerful to ensure that their family fortunes will last forever, or at least 999 years. That is normal as anyone in a position of power will only think of their own interests first. In many third world countries, the assumption to political power is like owning the right to be rich, to build their family fortunes.



Converting all residential properties from freehold to 99 year lease is unlikely to happen in the near future. No way will the rich and powerful allow this to happen as long as they are in control. Reality will see them consolidating their interests and wealth even more firmly, to the extent of being enshrined in the constitution.



The rich and powerful will continue to amass their fortunes in freehold properties. And with the removal of estate duties, there is nothing to prevent them from keeping their fortunes for many generations to come, forever. The new rich too will be doing the same, acquiring whatever freehold properties they could lay their hands on.



The unfortunate part is that the number of freehold residential properties is limited. A time will come when there will be hardly any left for the newcomers. The other unfortunate development is that the new rich and powerful would likely come from the HDB flat owners or 99 year leasehold owners. The super rich and powerful cannot be blessed with good fortunes forever. It has never been the case. All the good things must come to an end.



When the latecomers find themselves fenced off from the freehold properties they so desired and untouchable, it will be their turn to fiddle with the laws to give them a chance to acquire them. When all the freehold properties are no longer available, and no new freehold properties can be created, the new power brokers are going to do things to get a hold of the freehold properties. If they can’t buy them, they will change the laws to get them.



One possibility is to amend the land/property ownership laws to make all residential properties 99 years. If such a change takes place, no one needs to bother about estate duties anymore. The wealth and fortunes of the old rich will be recycled more regularly and the cycle is shorter. And it will be their own selfish wrong doings, to corner everything for themselves to the point that the new rich and powerful will be left with nothing but force to manipulate the law and the system to get what they want. By then the situation will be so ripe for a property ownership revolution.



It can happen and will happen when the new rich and powerful are shut out from their desires and wants. In human nature, all schemes are designed to self destruct no matter how superficially brilliant they appeared to be. Because of greed and selfishness, all such schemes will breakdown eventually.



What could be used as the excuse is the need for more land with an increasing population. The Land Acquisition Act will be reintroduced to acquire all landed properties in the Bukit Timah and Tanglin areas for redevelopment. The interesting part will be that these properties would by then be worth several hundred millions each and the govt of the day would not be able to compensate them adequately. History would be re-enacted when such properties would be acquired at a pittance to the govt on grounds of national interests. The carefully crafted laws and social political system to protect these properties till kingdom comes will go up in a wisp of smoke. Why not, when empires and dynasties could crumble, why can’t such inequitable laws make ways for a more equitable system? The more intractable is the system, the more unjust it becomes, the faster it would be done away with. The law of natural justice and social justice must prevail. Man proposes, heaven disposes.

I want to be a cab driver

The glorious reports of cab drivers earning $6k to $7k must be very attractive to many out of job PMETs. This used to be peanuts at one time. But today, with a stock market that is dying and performing worst than a fish market, when the income of many remisiers is less than a fishmonger or butcher or vegetable seller in the wet market, becoming a cab driver is now an attractive option. I am seriously thinking about this and would have jumped in if not of the risk of being beaten up by a drunk or murdered by a desperado. There is no need to risk life and limbs to be a cab driver. Leave it to the younger heroes that could defend themselves when attacked or their youthful bulk will keep the attackers at bay.

How about being a school teacher? Read that there is a great advertisement flying in Australia that our MOE is recruiting experienced teachers from down under. Some commented that with so many PMETs available, and a few thousand remisiers waiting to join the queue, perhaps MOE may want to send its flyer to these professionals who are also armed with quite a few pieces of papers and a mountain of life experiences to share with the young. Would not the MOE pick on our locals to educate our young or prefer to choose from some unknowns who would expect to be paid more than the locals, with housing and relocation allowances added?

I may seriously thinking of sharing my blogging experience with the youth in schools if I get an invitation to do so. Oh, I also got history as my background, having done some lecturing in National Education at one time. I may be an old ginger but physically fitter than many 50 year olds. Maybe MOE is specifically looking for the breath of experience that foreign talents can bring to educate our young with a new set of values and outlook in life. I have so many things to impart to our impressionable young, and to teach how not to cross OB markers as well. Or I may apply to go for retraining to be a masseur or a male nurse or to assist as a helper in a nursing home or hospice. Think of it, there are plenty of jobs available for unwanted PMETs. Just go for some training to downgrade the expectations.

Why the obsession for FTs?

Many CEOs are chirping and blowing their trumpets about the virtues of recruiting foreign talents. We need talents from all over the world, with a world view, with diverse views, to grow, to be competitive and innovative. Sure, when your company is an international company competing in the international market and needing an international team of staff with cross country knowledge and information to keep the company in touch with the rapid changes overseas. No body can argue against that. So Citibank has a very international staff, recruiting people from all over the world, as they have branches all over the world.



Why does a local company with local operations and local interests like the SMRT or the NTUC need foreign talents? For what? Why would the ministries, the stats boards or GLCs need foreign talents, to be international in their staff composition, to look international, to show people they are international when they don’t need to? There may be a need, an important need for some companies or institutions to want an international outlook, an international perspective that only foreigners and foreign talents can provide. But many do not need to do so. And this is simply commonsensical in a local operation when the customers are locals. Even banks like Citibank do not need to fill its staff with foreign talents when the branch is serving their own locals, in the cities or counties.



The obsession for foreign talents must not be allowed to become a blind fetish fad, a nice to have thing. Hiring foreigners must have clear and distinct objectives, a comparative advantage. Foolishly hiring foreigners for foreigner’s sake has an economic cost, a social cost and also a political cost. When our citizens are unemployed, especially the qualified, this is going to turn into a serious problem for families and the downfall of a govt.



In the medical industry when there is a shortage of local professionals, there is a need for foreigners to fill the vacancies. The doctors and nurses, preferably local to be able to relate and communicate with their patients could come from foreigners and with acceptable consequences. There are many jobs and professions that don’t need foreigners. Such companies and organisations are pretty obvious and when they do employ foreigners they will stand up like a sore thumb when locals are available. Worst, such institutions may be national in nature and have a national duty and responsibility to its own citizens.



The other big danger of padding the top management with foreigners is that the organisation could be hijacked and turned into their own fiefdom at the expense of the local owners. Citibank and many MNCs are good examples of being hijacked by their international crews and lost their identity and purpose of who they are and whose interests they are serving. The Americans and Europeans are facing this problem when the MNCs uprooted and left America for greener pastures.



The govt should seriously come out with a policy to curb this wanton recruitment of foreigners for the sake of looking international when there is no need to and when the local PMETs are left redundant, left in the lurch. I am referring to local and govt linked companies or govt institutions and ministries. For goodness sake, why do you want a Greek god as your PR man or Jolie Angeline as the receptionist for companies like NTUC or SBS or Pasar Malam Incorporation? Or why would you need a foreign accountant in your backroom? Your domestic operations and businesses do not need foreigners or foreign talents for their world views and perspectives.



There must be a place for the natives and for the natives to be gainfully employed with dignity and pride as citizens of the country. They must not be treated as expendables to be discarded ASAP when a FT is available.

Taking photography to new heights

40 years ago when I held a SLR it was like holding a precision machine with very accurate engineering to be able to do what it was designed to do. Today, a DSLR is still a very precise machine and more. It comes with a computer inside. This is the kind of power in the hands of a photographer.

40 years ago I was messing around in the dark room all alone, with chemicals and fearing a little ray of light sneaking into the room. And the processing of the negatives and printing were mainly done manually with a lot of guess works. Manipulating them for different effects was tedious and failure rate was extremely high. Today, every thing a dark room processing can do can be done much better and easier, with more control and refinement using a processing software loaded into a computer. No more messy stuff and expensive errors that had to be thrown away at great cost. The software can work practically at anywhere with no fear of sneaky lights. And any error can simply be erased and redo again at practically no cost.

The tools of photography and the nature of photography have taken a qualitative leap to allow photographers to do many things that they could not do before. With such powerful tools and computing power, there are many avenues to explore for the photographer. I was not content with just doing and repeating the same thing all over again, shooting the best portrait, the best bird in flight, night photography, sports photography, travel photography, macro or micro photography. In many of these areas, everything has been done and shot by the professionals.

With two computers, one in the hand, one sitting on the table, and a more power third computer in the head, I started to explore and experiment with the untouchables, the taboos, the things that were frowned upon, striking out into new frontiers, to capitalise on the power of 3 computers. Photographers must do justice to the enormous creative powers their tools are able to perform today.

The first step I took was to embrace refraction, something that was nearly totally disregarded by photographers for the distortion it caused. Conventional photography is all about reflection, shooting an object to get a clear and crisp image. At times blurring and zooming effects were introduced, bokehs etc, but still an act of reflection.

Refraction is about seeing light travelling through more than one medium of different density. The bending of light through a prism to reveal the rainbow colours is a basic example of reflection. Light contains many things that the naked eyes could not see. Light is after all an electromagnetic wave. The signals received on radio or the television, through the phone, are all electromagnetic waves with information of sound and images embedded in them. The decoder in the TV unscrambles the information to make them visible and audible.

Light entering and exiting a medium like water are distorted by refraction and reflection. It also picks up other information that we could not see but exists. If only such information can be translated into something visible, revealing what they were like a TV image through a decoder, the final image can be stunning and unpredictable.

The Art of RAR or Reflection and Refraction is a technique that I have developed exactly to do this function. The images taken in the water will not be seen through the naked eyes or the camera sensor. The water will still appear as an image of water in the sensor. Through processing, the multiple images hidden in the light that came out of water can be seen in all its glories.

The Art of RAR is a key or a decoder to do this job. Many unseen images cannot be obtained from a seemingly non existence object in the water. With this methodology, photography is now able to do something new, something that was impossible and now possible. The images that came out from this technique can still be like a photographic image or an image that looks exactly like a painting with no trace of it being a photograph. It is a new field of photography that modern technology makes possible with the help of the creative and imaginative mind of a photographer. The possibilities are unlimited and photographers, with their creativity and imagination, could move beyond the confines of conventional photography, to explore new frontiers using the camera to produce new art forms.

The Art of RAR is not the only new technique available and more creative usages of the camera and technology would likely to lead to more innovative ways to expand the art of photography and how to use the camera. The art of photography is beginning to see new light.

Chua Chin Leng

Natural selection in Sin

Survival of the fittest is the oldest law of Nature. In the wild, Nature ensures that the fittest survives to continue the existence of specie. There is no exception, survive or perish.

There is a NYT article in the Sunday Times today on the success of Asians in American elite or specialised high schools. Of 14,415 students admitted to New York City High Schools, 59% were Asians. In 1971, Stuyvesant High School was mostly white, with 10 % black and 4% Hispanics. Today, it is 72% Asians and less than 4% black or Hispanics and the rest white.

There were protest that the admission system based on test or academic abilities is unacceptable as it would edge out the blacks and Hispanics. The govt stood its ground. NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, ‘You pass the test,…you get the highest score, you get into the school, no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background is.’ There is no affirmative action for the less able blacks and Hispanics.

After centuries of practicing racial discriminations against the Asians, the US of today is living up to its Constitution, of equal rights for all. Of course in many areas, this is still far from the truth. In this particular area on education, in New York City, this is the way forward.

Close to home, how far is this meritocracy being practiced? In many ways we are like New York City, the most able academically will be allowed to go to the best schools. Meritocracy in practice by the human beans is closely mirroring survival of the fittest in the wild, a process of natural selection. Of course there are exceptions.

The practice of natural selection has its consequences. The less able will eventually be extinct or elbowed out of the system. In New York City and in Sin, there is this other element that is not recognised or not spoken. The New Yorkers are protesting against meritocracy for their own reasons. They do not want to lose out economically. In Sin, when ‘foreign talents’ are imported in large numbers, as much as 50% of the population, and if they really are more talented than the natives, the outcome would see the natives being discriminated by meritocracy when the foreigners moved in to secure the places in the good schools, the good jobs, the better housing and everything else.

It is only a matter of time when the less able natives will have to move out, to make way for the foreigners, the new citizens, the more meritorious. Is this what we want, is this what nation building is all about? Do the natives think that their country should be inherited by the more talented and they have no place of existence or be around just to serve the new and more deserving citizens? Is this a country, or just a hotel.