The oil rig industry in a tailspin

The crashing of oil prices to below $31 from its dizzying height of more than $120 per barrel is going to take its toll on many blue eye boys, I mean blue eye companies.  Never mind if this is a war against shale oil production or green energy production, oil prices have come down to earth.

The first casualties are the rig builders, the darlings of yesterday with order books to the brim to last another 20 years of growth. Overnight the orders turned into smokes and according to some analysts the oil rig companies are facing bankruptcies! The reports are talking about Keppel Corp and SembCorp Marine, two of our blue chip companies whose stock prices have fallen by 40 or 50%..

If the reports are real, or close to the truth, then someone will be looking for buyers of these companies just like NOL. The wheel of fortune is really spinning hard and fast. Maybe they should look at China to be the Yellow Knight. China has just saved Najib from his 1MDB investment flirtation. Don’t sneer, China has very good reasons, economic reasons, to want to buy up the half completed oil rigs for a song. At least the oil rig builders need not file for Section 11.

Look, China is developing the oil fields in the South China Sea and would need a lot of cheap oil rigs. And since we are able to sell them cheaply, China may be interested to pick them up with the companies thrown in. But just be careful should China raise the issue of hosting American spy planes and ships to harass them in the South China Sea. This would drag in politics from an otherwise clean economic deal.

Would anyone be sending a team to China to invite the Yellow Knight to save the day? The Singapore Discount or Singapore Sale is on again for oil rigs or oil rig builders. Would these companies be renamed Keppel Corp(China) and SembCorp Marine(China)?

Green men and green potatoes

Someone is reported to have encountered green potatoes in his fridge. Luckily not little green men.  The first remark he got from a ‘doctor’, dunno from where, quack or qualified from our world class medical school, the potatoes turning green could be due to Agent Orange. Why Agent Orange turns purple sweet potatoes not to orange but green, I really dunno.

It is a frightening thought if Agent Orange is among us, in our supermarket, in our food chain. If you have seen those children in Vietnam and the US affected by this
Agent you will flip if you discover that you have taken food that may be tainted.

In this case, not to worry. AVA has assured the public that the green colour ‘could be due to a “natural occurrence, when the water soluble pigments in the cooked sweet potatoes are exposed to air”.’ I dunno how long Vietnamese agricultural food, like vegetables and fruits and meat have been in our system and been consumed by the people here, so far no cases of Agent Orange deformities has been reported. So must be safe to eat food from Vietnam.  The AVA is also reported to have assured the public that food imports, including Vietnamese sweet potatoes, are regularly tested for chemicals and other forms of contaminations.

Anyway I choose to avoid Vietnamese food products exposed to water and soil in Vietnam. I can’t shrug off knowing that the kind Americans had poured millions of tons of chemicals to fertilize the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, and Agent Orange was the most popular of the human fertilizers.

My advice of women conceiving babies is best to avoid food from such sources.  Foetus are highly susceptible to all kinds of chemicals. Just a personal opinion.  It is safe or else AVA would not have allowed them in, just like the millions of foreigners, all very safe. And all have passed the stringent test, including checks on their degrees and certificates. All very safe, food, vegetables, meat and migrants.  The Europeans are also welcoming the migrants happily and in big numbers, though not as big as ours, and all very safe. They only need to integrate them like the way we do and all the teething problems will be over in due time.

Dunno if European countries are importing food from Vietnam or from Fukushima.

MOE, MOM and WDA restructured

The double reporting of WDA to MOE and MOM has been straightened out with WDA now reporting to MOE under Ong Ye Kung. Ong Ye Kung will not be the Coordinating Minister for MOE/MOM/WDA and SkillsFuture training to make sure MOE is training graduates with the right skills for the industries and not ending up skillless, got talent and a lot of knowledge but no employers want to employ them.

The above was yesterday’s news. Today, MOE is overseeing Pre-employment training(PET) and continuous education and training(CET) under a new stats board called Skills Future Singapore(SSG).  The Workforce Development Agency will now become Workforce Singapore, a new stats board under the MOM. It would retain the former role of WDA, ie employment facilitation, career services and industry engagement.  These two stats board would solve the problems of employment faced by Singaporeans trained with skills not wanted by employers.

I really hope it is so simple, train the people with the right skills and the employers would happily employ them instead of foreigners. I am sure anyone with a little commonsense would know the real reasons why our talented young graduates are not employed but foreigners are in demand. And it is not just cheap labour. Cheap labour could be one of the reasons, but there are other more sinister reasons that dumbasses would not want to see.

I bet, even if all our graduates are trained with all the skills employers need and willing to accept competitive pay, they will still be passed over just like what is happening today. I was going to suggest that Ong Ye Kung send an army of teachers and civil servants to the 3^rd World countries to find out why they are producing the right graduates with the right skills and talents that our industries and govt agencies are so happy to employ. Of course this is just a red herring when stupidity is the reason.

I am asking the same question aloud once more. Why are 3^rd world half baked education system able to produce the workers that a first world city needs? And why are our students paying for a very expensive education, educated in world best universities and did not have the skills ‘OUR’ employers want? If the 3^rd world countries are doing the right thing, then I would suggest that everyone in MOE and the world class universities be sacked. They are not doing the right thing, producing unfits, dysfunctional graduates that cannot be used by the industries. And we should send a team of educators to the 3^rd world countries to learn from them, from their cheap education system, teaching little but producing the right graduates for our system.

Of course the half baked 3^rd world education systems are no match to our world class super expensive system. Then what is wrong? I bet on one knows. That is why they are still scratching the wrong balls without addressing the real problem. If they know what is wrong, dare to face the truth, and stop being stupid, there is no need to waste time setting up two new stats boards to engage in shadow play.

Yes, they said stupidity has no cure. Anyway, let’s hope Ong Ye Kung knows what is happening and could save the day like Boon Wan saving the housing problems by simply building more flats. The reason or solution to Singaporean graduates and PMEs being sidelined and unemployed is so basic and easy, as easy as building more flats. No need to muck around and fighting with shadows. Tiok boh?

Super expensive world  class education producing dysfunctional graduates not fit and not wanted by the industries? And everyone is running around like bull arses flies, looking so busy, and scratching the wrong balls.

And they forgot to set up a COI to study what is wrong!

Monster ship, monster aircraft

What kind of ship or aircraft would deserve the title ‘monster’?  The images I have of monster ship or aircraft are those of alien space ships in the movie Independence Day and Star Wars. These are not only huge but really deadly. Back on earth, what kind of ship or aircraft could come near to these monster space ship? What about the aircraft carriers of the mighty American naval fleet? Are they big and monstrous enough, with nuclear weapons and thousands of fighting men and machine? What about the B 52 bombers aka flying fortresses with the nuclear bombs hanging under their bellies? Would these be fitting to be called monster ship and monster aircraft?

According to an ST article on 11 Dec by a China Correspondence, Teo Cheng Wee, titled ‘China builds second ‘monster’ ship’, the monster ship he referred to is a mega coast guard ship of 12,000 tonnes. Wow, 12,000 tonnes, so big, so monstrous. Can’t blame children, anything bigger than a bus must be a monster. Children have very limited knowledge of how big the world is. A coast guard ship of 12,000 tonnes is a monster.  If I were a teacher I would give him full mark as children need to be encouraged for their innocence.

I am wondering what would this correspondent describe the American aircraft carriers and the B 52 bombers. Maybe he can’t find a word big enough in his vocabulary to describe such monsters. What would be bigger and more deadly than a monster coast guard ship of 12,000 tonnes? What to call an aircraft carrier or a B 52 bomber? A super yacht or a super flying bus?

Any suggestion? Why would a correspondent describe a teeny weeny 12,000 ton coast guard boat with a few anti aircraft guns as a monster? Never seen ship bigger ship than this? The sight of such a big ship must be very impressive to children.

Signs of desperation to collect more money

A suggestion that the govt is desperate for money would be simply brush aside as hogwash. How could the govt be short of money when they could throw parties and spent millions, hundreds of millions without a blink of the eye, spending billions on scholarships for foreigners, etc etc? And the national reserves, probably a trillion dollars, and the regular pumping by the people into the CPF in the billions every month, the COEs and all kinds of schemes to collect more money, the govt has plenty of money, even with the big losses in HDB flat subsidies, the govt got so much money that it can be described as ‘chiat buay leow’.

But why is the govt introducing such unbelieveable schemes to make the citizens pay and pay like it is desperate for money? The stock markers all over have fallen and a lot of billions must have been wiped out recently, easily 20% of any fund. But many of the schemes to collect more money from the people were conceived before the collapse of the stock markets so have nothing to do with the losses in equity investments. Anyway such investments are long term.

The Medishield Life, with a stroke of a pen everyone must pay from birth to death, to this insurance scheme must reap in a lot of money. How many insurance agents could sell insurance to 3.5m people in one go? That is not all. The CPF still demands the contributors to top up a Basic Healthcare Sum of $49,800 to be locked up for life. If 2m members the sum will come to be nearly $100b of the CPF contributors money stuck in the Scheme. For what and for who?

And that is not all. Citizens who are living overseas, paying their own insurance schemes overseas, some may not even return and been overseas for decades, must also contribute to the Medishield Life Insurance Scheme! Like this, you think desperate or not? Many of our citizens may not even return here to benefit from the Medishield Life. Why must they be made to pay for it, for life? There are many children born overseas by parents that are PRs to their host countries. These children who are still Singaporeans, must also pay for Medishield Life without stepping into the island. Like that, right or wrong? Can or not?

And they taking away free parking in schools from the teachers? What about the police and soldiers in the camps? What about grassroot leaders having free parkings, want to take away also? In remote corners of the islands, more and more of such parking spaces would be turned to pay parking.

What do you think, desperate of not?