Bounty schemes for hunting down cheats

The announcement by MOM on hiring an Indian company to check on the CVs and qualifications of Indian PMEs here is throwing up a lot of meaningful and effective suggestions from cyberspace. So don’t say bloggers only criticize and did not offer solutions. Instead of throwing good money after bad money, some bloggers commented it is an absolute stupidity, brainless piece of work, it should be one based on rewards like the bounty hunters.
 
The bounty hunter scheme does not pay blindly and useless and unfruitful work, like a bottomless pit, for bull shitting works that yielded no results. It pays for results. The hunters are paid for every head they brought in. A range of $200 to $10,000 can be offered as reward according to the income or seniority of the cheat. This will incentivize the hunters to go for the kill, the biggies. Then the bill can be presented to the company that did the hiring as fines. Make the companies responsible for the cost incurred.
 
Under the present scheme, an agency could go through the motion and collect $100 each without producing any result or doing anything. Just file the reports with fictitious work done. Don’t worry, they have honed this cheating game to fine arts and know exactly how to fool the super talents here. After all they have been doing it all these years and with a few hundred thousand cheats working here as PMEs.
 
Go for the real stuff and stop monkeying around and wasting public money. Oops, I don’t think the bloggers are smart enough to come out with anything better than the present scheme of MOM.
 
I apologise on behalf of all the daft bloggers and their daft suggestions. A thousand apologies.

Avert culture of entitlement

The ST editorial today talked about averting the entitlement culture with respect to COE. The demand for cars is going up but not the supply. As more and more people, especially the rich foreign talents, are brought in, you can expect the squeeze on the few COEs available. It is normal and natural, no one’s fault, just market forces. Do you want growth? How many believe in this crap?
 
Then again, Sinkies must get use to this kind of philosophy. You are not entitled to anything with your citizenship. No one, not even the govt, is responsible to your basic needs. It is all determined by market forces and affordability ie if you can pay for it.
 
Sinkies must erase this entitlement mentality. Don’t think you are entitled to public housing. Don’t think your children are entitled to a place in the universities or schools. Don’t think that you are entitled to a job, especially a good job. There are millions or hungry and more talented mercenaries out there waiting to take your place. Their rights and passport to a job here is their talent, meritocracy. If you are not meritorious enough, sorry, the job goes to the best man or woman even if that is a foreigner.
 
Is there anything else that Sinkies believed they are entitled to? The return of their life savings? Keep hoping. The only thing they are entitled to perhaps are doing National Service and be compelled by all the compulsory payment schemes by the govt. No, they are not taxes. Swear. They are good for you. These compulsory payment schemes are your entitlements as citizens.
 
Oh, you are entitled to the world’s best paid govt that will take very good care of your welfare, second only to the meritorious foreigners who are more meritocratic and deserving to jobs, car ownerships and home ownerships and whatever that is of value. Entitlement here, regardless of whether you are a citizen or not, is based on meritocracy.
 
So, please don’t talk or think entitlement anymore just because you hold the pink IC.

Is this an official message?

Grappling with new problems and looking for new solutions

Public transport is a serious problem with rising cost and growing number of commuters but limited lines and roads. The population growth will outrun the availability of trains and buses and will cripple the economy and social life of the citizens earlier than you think.

The bigger problem is this new demon called medical cost. The Medishield Life and all kinds of insurance are fake or insincere attempts to solve the problem. It is not solving the problem but forcing the people to pay more and creating a bigger financial problem for the people. The stone mills of housing and owning a car and now a medical stone mill to hang on the people’s neck. For the rich it is no problem. To many Sinkies it is serious problem. When you don’t have the money means you don’t have the money to pay and 10c can also be a big problem.

Life insurance is a good thing that the pioneering generation did not to protect their families in the advent of premature death and the lost of household income, or the only breadwinner. Medical insurance was a luxury or something that was a non issue, not needed in the past. There was never a need to have medical insurance until the medical profession was allowed to turn into a money spinning machine and to hold ransom on the sick, rich or poor. Today they tell you your life is priceless and so you must pay as they demand from you.

The new generations have got used to the new normal of paying for expensive medical care and for having to wait for months and years for a medical appointment. It wasn’t like that before. It should not be this way until greed took over from the top to the toe. Greed is good, so let it be, just make the people pay.

We had free medical services, even free medicine in the past when our country was far from being rich. The country was a developing nation and thrift was the order of the day. But the govt of the day could provide free medical services and you don’t have to wait for more than a few hours to be admitted into a hospital. There were few hospital beds but enough to be waiting for patients. There were few doctors but enough doctors to see the patient even on appointment basis.

We are filthy rich today, if that is the truth. We have more hospitals than the past, more doctors and specialists, and we are caught in a bind. And medical cost keeps ballooning as if a natural phenomenon, a good thing for the GDP and a good justification for those whose income depends on it.

What went wrong? Nothing? The philosophy was wrong, the policies were wrong, the mission was wrong, everything was wrong. But no one wants to know what went wrong. The only thing they know is to make the people pay and pay. If people cannot pay today, make sure they pay by instalments for the whole life. There is the Medisave Minimum Sum waiting to be milked dry. It is so convenient.

When the Medishield Life is in force, the demand for medical services will hit the roof. Why not, when everything is already paid out front? There were no medical insurance in the past and there was no over over demand for medical services. There is high manipulated population growth today, but why are medical services, facilities, professionals lacking the population growth? Who allows the cost of medical services to run wild by not manipulating it to a reasonable and humanly affordable level? The cost of medical services today is only affordable to the immortals, not ordinary human beans.

Without addressing and arresting the high medical cost, all the solutions are fake and feeble attempts to solve a real problem.

In the past, the doctors charged the patients according to their worth, not so much as according to the illness. There is some wisdom to it. Rob from the rich and pay the poor. There is another reason, the lives of the poor are less worthy and the cost of medicine could be more than the patient’s worth. How much is a down and out loser’s life worth compares to a super rich talent? The idealist and naïve will tell you that every life is valuable and priceless. Really? I choose to disagree and respect your views that all lives are priceless and must be saved and everyone must dutifully be forced to pay a ransom to be kept alive, like it or not, worth it or not.

Everyone shall be entitled to place a value on his own life and decide if he/she wants to pay the price and what price to live. It must not be a compulsion by some other beans that may have other agendas to make the poor pay for something they don’t need or cannot afford when their little money could be put to better use.

It is better to have a little money to live well than to have no money and live miserably, with no dignity.

Kopi level - Green

Running out of space now matter what

Sitting at my office in MBFC and enjoying the vast expanse of the sea and the marina gives me a very strange feeling. The very spot where I was sitting was the sea, nearly a kilometer from the former shore line at ‘Ang Teng’ or Clifford Pier. And looking ahead, there is another kilometer or more of reclaimed land before the new coastline. So much land has been added but will never be enough.

Practically every piece of the new land created is now occupied, built up or in the process of development. Instead of creating more land for recreation, to improve the life of the people, oh yes, the development for economic reasons is also to improve the people’s life, the new land are being filled up and used up immediately. And soon people will be demanding for more land.

If we don’t kill the idea of putting more people on this island, no amount of land reclamation will be enough. Even building a few more Towers of Babel will not be enough. We are small, very small, a speck as far as land is concerned. 

There is a serious need to rethink on what we should do with the lives of the citizens and the limited land that we have. It cannot keep going on like this and thinking that it can go on and on. There is a heavy price to pay for going down this road. Why keep creating space only to fill them up with more people? We would never even be bigger than Bintan. We need to be very prudent in the use of our land. And the last thing, to bring in more people to occupy them.

Saw an Army recruitment advertisement in the ST this morning. It has this flashed, ‘How far would you go to protect our home?’ Do we need to protect our home when it is occupied and stuffed with foreigners, many with new pink ICs? Wait for the day when Sinkies would have to rent a place to sleep from foreigners and foreigners turned citizens.

Maybe this would not happen as many foreigners are buying the properties and accepting the pink ICs temporarily. They would sell the properties back to the Sinkies at a high profit before returning or departing to somewhere else. Only daft Sinkies have to grab a home at whatever price to put a roof over their heads.

Full time MP not a good idea

A very strange article by Rachel Chang in yesterday’s ST made me wonder why she wrote it and what made her came to such a conclusion. At the end of her piece she finally said, ‘MPs here rarely draft laws, and the scrutiny process over government Bills is brief and uncomplex compared with other legislatures…no need to travel long distances to get back to their home constituencies from the capital, nor are they required to raise huge amounts of funds for political activities…’ She took note of the Meet the People Session and the increasing workload but not enough to justify full time MP.

There is also a lack of interest among MPs and potential MPs who are successful professionals to want to give up their profession to be full time MPs. The $16,000 is just not attractive enough for the big income earners to want to become full time MPs.

So, which is the more important justification to say that full time MP is not a good idea, not enough meaningful work or the income of professionals is too good to forgo? It is understandable that top income earners would have little inspiration to want to go into politics and to sacrifice their huge personal income. But this can be resolved in two ways, one, make them ministers or ministers of state when the multi million dollar package will be fairly compatible. The other golden goose that could be a good alternative is to allow them to take up as many directorships as they like. After all the workload of an MP does not need the attention of a full time MP. A caveat is that high earning professionals will make good MPs or even ministers. The reality has proven otherwise. Professionals with their hearts misplaced can caused more harm than good.

There are other views of why people want to become an MP. Some see it as a calling, to serve the people and country, and money is not the most important thing to them. A good example is Chen Show Mao. Some may have made enough bucks and would want to do something more meaningful than just trying to fatten their bank accounts for several generations to feed on.

Seriously, who gave Rachel Chang the idea that MP’s workload is nothing more than a part time job? Actually, an MP’s job can be a part time job and also a full time job. It depends on how much the person is willing to put himself into the affairs of the state and the welfare of the people. If an MP thinks his job is to just spend a little time to meet the people, have a few walkabouts, shake a few hands and kiss a few babies, and suka suka attend a few parliamentary sessions since they are not much legislative work to do except to vote yes or no, then it is indeed a part time job. A machine could do just as fine and cheaper for sure. A machine also does not have a heart.

On the other hand an MP could be so involved in the affairs of the state and the people that there is just not enough time even for a full time MP. It is relative and how one looks at the MP job and how important is his role to better the lives of the people in his constituency and across the nation. Voting in parliament without having to think does not need much time, just 30 seconds to raise the hand.

In a way, a PM or a Minister too can be a part time job. But some will need 25 hours a day to do his job well, or still cannot do his job well. And there are MPs that are so free or so efficient that they can take on as many directorships as they like, advisory roles and full time jobs and still got time to spare to play golf or engage in their favourite past times.

What do you think, MP should be part time or full time?

Kopi level - Yellow