The drumming continues

Roll out the big drums and keep drumming.
Stoke the amber and fan it into a fire.
Now who is beating the drums and fanning the fire?
Who is doing the heckling and who is being heckled?

What do you think?

Free university education?

Can this be true? Even if it is true, the quality must be bad. How can free things be good? You want quality you must be prepared to pay for it. The more you pay, the higher the quality. It must be, like our world best govt.

Effective this year, the whole of Germany will provide free university education when Lower Saxony decided to abolish university tuition fees. Wow, this is like fiction. Actually many countries in Europe provide free university education. Bloody hell, I am like a frog in a well. Only today then I heard about it, read about it. Scandinavian countries like Norway, Denmark and Sweden have been providing free university education for many years and it seems that this is a trend and other countries are following suit. In UK, Welsh university education is free for Welsh.

According to a chart from Source: http://www.zmescience.com/other/germany-education-fees-01102014/  Scotland and several East European countries are also providing free university education for their citizens. University fees in Spain, France and Belgium are less than 1000 euros per year while Portugal, Italy and a few East European states are charging less than 3000 euros. No wonder their rankings are lower than our world best universities.

How much are we charging our students? Britain charges more than 9000 euros for their universities, the most expensive. I think we must be modeling after Britain and using Britain as a benchmark in fees and quality. Our universities are comparable to the best of the British in both counts so it is only appropriate to benchmark against them.

Why are some of these countries starting to offer free university education to their citizens? Simple. It is an investment. The better educated the people are, the more productive they are and better serve the country and its economy. Put it the other way, if the university education is so expensive that the people are not university graduates, how are there going to contribute to the economy? Would they be happy to be hawkers and crane drivers? In Sin City, many graduates are now good enough to drive taxis.

What if our citizens are all non graduates, would we be importing all the top and highly paid employees from abroad, the foreign talents? Highly skilled jobs and professions need university education. You cannot have doctors, engineers, scientist etc without tertiary education. Wait a minute, I may be wrong here, there were doctors in the past without university education, like sinsehs, dentists and many other professions. Could be self taught. Is this a contradiction? Never mind if we can live with fakes.

We need high quality university education. And of course quality means money. The buildings, the foreign talent professors, the land, very expensive here, the material, everything needs to be paid for. No money how can?

And providing university education is a big commercial business and can bring in a lot of revenue. Maybe this is one of the main reasons why our universities are so obsessed with university rankings. It is a big money making business. But can we also follow those countries to provide free university education to our citizens and make foreign students pay instead of providing free education to foreign students and make ours pay? Funny right?

The Welsh are providing free for their citizens? The European Unions are charging their member country students a lower fee than those outside of the EU. Is there anything we can learn from this news? Are we doing the right thing or the wrong thing?

Kopi Level - Green

China Speaks for all Hong Kong, According to The Basic Law.

By MIKOspace

Democracy is about the Rule of Law, Not the Rule of the Mob. Never mind the size of the Mob Crowd or the loud noise of the Rabble. They have no place in a Democracy when illegal. HK students represent NOBODY.

It is clear that the Hong Kong demonstrators, mostly students encouraged by politicians with their own agenda, do not care about the livelihood and well-being of the rest of Hong Kong, who is really the majority. The Hong Kong demonstrators are fighting only for themselves, NOT for the majority of HK people. They should now keep quiet and listen to the rest of Hong Kong whose families has lost much needed incomes from reduced tourism and disruptions to transportation.  The loss of tourism earnings by 7% must seriously hit the pockets of taxi drivers, retail shop owners, amusement centre operators, tour guides, tour operators, restaurants, hotels and, yes, the parents, uncles/aunties, relatives and siblings of the demonstrators.  The earnings loss will never be recovered.

Never has the abuse of Democratic freedom so blatant.  The inherent right to peaceful protests has been openly misused to riot over unfounded fears about the future.  Nothing is more frightening than to lash out at shadows when believing monsters residing within.  

WHO will speak for those hurt most by irresponsible Hong Kong demonstrators? According to the Basic Law of Hong Kong, it is China.      

Under British common law, the owner’s right to the return of his “stolen” property is absolute.  And any agreement to abridge or limit such rights by stating conditions for the lawful return of rightful property has no basis in law and therefore unenforceable. Whither the HK Basic Law?  

The Hong Kong Basic Law is a purely domestic legislation deriving its authority from the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In fact, Basic Law’s Article 158 specifically vested the power of final interpretation of the HK Basic Law in the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC) which is the highest organ of state whose power is derived from the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Ergo, YES, the PRC Constitution supersedes the Basic Law of Hong Kong SAR.  In fact, it was the NPCSC who adopted and approved the HK Basic Law on 4 April 1990, and came into effect on Handover Day, 1 July 1997

Essentially, the HK Basic Law, which is the outcome of the Joint Declaration between PRC and the British government on Hong Kong, acts as the historic interim (50 years) agreement on the rightful RETURN of Hong Kong back to the People's Republic of China.

Hong Kong is NOT Scotland. Scotland conquered England (plus Wales) in 1603, and UK was formed in 1707 together with Ireland. Unlike Scotland, Hong Kong has always belonged to China, who was forced to cede it to the British under the shameful Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 when China lost the Opium War with Britain after failing to stop Britain from selling the profitable poison to the Chinese people. It's like the Mexican/Latin American Drug cartels demanding the State of Texas as payment and compensation for American destruction of their lucrative cocaine trade in the American war on drug.

Unlike Scotland, the option for Hong Kong independence is not available since she is just a SMALL Chinese city and an integral part of China. Hong Kong people must learn HOW to live as part of China, not apart. 

Read more:

China Speaks for All Hong Kongers, According to Basic Law

Kopi Level - Green

Another stock market story

Looks like the remisiers and traders are very free these days and have a lot of time to activate their creative juice. Some are turning into poets.

There is a big playground for adults in Singapore ...
It's called the stock market
We used to love to play here
There were many people with similar objective playing in this playground
There used to be much excitement here
But in the recent past many months, this playground is deserted
On any given days, there is hardly any people going there
I still go there everyday, I want to play, I want to try
No matter how I do, I can't find any other people playing here
I always played with the same people and ...
With each passing day, less & less people dropped by
It's getting harder & harder to be motivated to come here...
I used to look forward coming here ... but now
I dread coming here ... It's like going to those Sentosa apartments,
There is hardly anybody there ...
Something is wrong in this playground, very WRONG indeed!

Kopi Level - Yellow

A desperate plea to the foreign talents

40% of the population in this island is foreigners. And depending on the parameters one is using, or the definition, true blue Singaporeans are now an absolute minority in their city island. The Singaporeans have been told to be grateful to the foreigners for they are here to help them and create jobs for them. And the foreigners know that they are the white knights that are here to save the daft citizens for without them the little island will go down the chute to the 3rd World. For recognition of this hard truth, the daft citizens are all grateful to the foreigners and welcomed them with open arms and open legs.
 
The foreigners, especially the fakes, knew how important they are to the citizens and their good life. They know that the good life of the daft citizens will be an issue without them. It is a nice balance with both sides understanding where they stand. The citizens even sent love letters to the construction workers to show their appreciation for building the flats for them. The citizens with the help of the govt are helping the foreigners to integrate and adapt themselves to the island, to make their living pleasant, and to feel very welcome. The citizens have been coaxed to be nice to the foreigners. Even when a group of foreigners rioted, they were referred to as very nice people. No offensive words must be used against the foreigners to hurt their feelings.
 
The foreigners even demanded for equal rights with the citizens and privileges like places for their children. Some foreigners are starting to lose their patience with the citizens. They found the citizens really daft, no skill sets to be employable, university graduates but unemployable. They got so frustrated with the local retards that they insisted on bringing in their talents from their village universities to replace the so called local talents from so called top ranking universities. Many local PMEs were booted out from jobs that they were doing well for ten or twenty years only to be made redundant and be replaced by talented graduates from degree mills universities or unheard of universities.
 
The replacement of the locals by the foreign talents is like a coordinated movement and organizations are increasing filling their positions with more foreigners than citizens. They are taking more and more of the top jobs that locals are unfit to do.
 
In the streets, foreigners are losing their patients with the locals too and would not hesitate to take the law into their own hands, to wallop the lazy, slow and daft citizens.
 
This is a plea to the foreign talents not to take all the good jobs from the locals. Please leave some jobs for the citizens or they will all end up as taxi drivers. And don’t forget that they have a huge mortgage to pay and children to send overseas for their education. So please don’t take up too many university places as well. Many parents had to sell their flats just because the university places were taken up by foreign students. And please, our citizen lecturers and professors also need to work, to teach. Please do not replace them with talented foreigners no matter how good they are. It is undesirable for our citizen university dons to drive taxis.
 
You talented foreigners have taken a lot of our top jobs and middle management jobs. We are not complaining if you are taking over the manual jobs in the construction industry. But leave some cleaners jobs in the food courts to the citizens please. They need to work to have a bit of dignity even at 70 or 80.
And please don’t beat us whenever you are unhappy or provoked by the daft citizens when they got into your way. They did not know that they should be out of your way. And please don’t cheat our oldies. They have a lot of money but they are all suffering from dementia or simply gullible and are easy targets. They worked very hard for a life time. Please don’t cheat or rob them of their life savings.
 
Please, please, tolong, tolong. Be kinder to us, the daft citizens of this island. And when you foreigners eventually take over all the top jobs in the island and the govt, have mercy on us, the original citizens. We are very nice people too, really. We don’t mind inviting all of you and your village kins here to take over our jobs and our country. Just be nicer to us and leave some crumbs for us.
 
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Koipi Level - Yellow