The bull about PMET unemployment

I have been writing about how difficult it was for PMETs to find reemployment after being laid off. Some took 6 to 8 months, some years, some gave up completely. And I have many sad stories to tell from the number of people in Gilbert Goh’s transitioning.org blog and their testimonies. These people could not be lying as there were real people. And I too have heard and met people that were unemployed or underemployed or simply resigned to retirement.


In the main media on 21 Apr, the MOM came out with a slush of statistics as proof that PMETs were the hardest hit in being laid off last year, all 15,580 of them. And they all have great difficulties finding new employment. The average time, in months for those retrenched or laid off to be reemployed was 2.21 months. The younger and less qualified workers could find new employments slightly faster, averaging less than 2 months. The older PMETs, above 50 and with tertiary qualifications found it more difficult, averaged slightly more than 2 months or about 2.3 months to be reemployed.


So sad, so pathetic.  Really? Let’s see, it would take a couple of weeks for anyone laid off worker to look for a new job, to send out resumes, a couple of weeks to get a reply and a couple of weeks for interviews. These processes would work out to about 2 to 3 months. And if these PMETs could find jobs in less than 3 months, averaging less than 2.5 months, what is the problem? Isn’t this as good as the perfect normal for people changing jobs?


Now, what is this great bull about PMETs finding it difficult to find reemployment? To get reemployed in less than 2.5 months is about the best one can ever get. No problem at all. Absolutely no problem.


What was this nonsense that there were PMETs taking more than 6 months or more than a year to find a job? What was this nonsense that some took several years and some gave up and retired because they could not find a job any more? Got such things or not? Real or not!


I think all these unemployment craps are hoaxes, not true. How can people say it is difficult to find another job when they could be reemployed in less than 2.5 months? What a load of rubbish Someone is lying and telling cock and bull stories. It is a very happy situation as far as I am concern if our PMETs can find reemployment in less than 2.5 months. Tiok boh?  It cannot be any better.


Something amissed? What is missing? To me there is no problem at all. It is too easy to find reemployment here if one only needs to take 2.5 months to do so. Now, where are those PMETs or young graduates that have to write a few hundred resumes and did not get any reply? Cannot be right? These people must be lying. It is very easy to get a job, the most 2.5 months according to MOM. Of course you can say you don’t believe what I am saying. But please don’t say you don’t believe MOM. And statistics don’t lie. And statistics from MOM lagi don’t lie.


There is no unemployment problem for PMETs in Singapore. Period. Getting another job in less than 3 months is like a piece of cake. You cannot ask for more.

Najib should ask ex PM Abbot, where is the MH370 wreckage

Two years have passed and there is no sign or clue on the where about of the MH370 wreckage despite spending hundreds of millions, manpower and resources in the remote corner of the Antarctic Ocean.  The most stupid thing men in leadership position could have done or conned into doing. The picture is now absolutely clear. The whole search exercise in the Antarctic Ocean was a hoax, a big wicked scheme to mislead the search parties to the wrong corner of the world and not meant to find the wreck of the MH370.

The Immarsat ping, and PM Abbot’s frantic and confident call to Najib to tell him he knew where the plane had crashed became more suspicious today and could be the only lead to the real cause of the disappearance of the MH370.  The party involved in this mysterious incident was behind the Immarsat ping and behind Abbot’s Freudian slip. Both were planted to give some fake clues to set the ball rolling into one of the most expensive and massive evil scheme in human history.

It is time to find out who is behind the Immarsat ping story and who told Abbot to tell Najib he knew where the crash site was. How did Immarsat got this ping story, planted by who? Who spoke to Abbot to tell his wicked story to Najib? Abbot could not wake up from his sleep and knew where the crash site was. Someone told him, fed him with the information and he was so happy to act as the messenger boy. Who is the source of his information?

Najib, it is time to ask your ‘good friend’ Abbot where he got his information from. Ask him to simply disclose his sources. The information for sure did not come from a kangaroo or a koala bear. Abbot is the link to the truth of the MH370 disappearance. Abbot holds the clue. Speak to him before he is silenced for good.

Also, don’t forget the Immarsat angle. They too hold the clue to the mischief creator. Who planted all the false information to deceive? Who had the reason to want to mislead and lead the search party to a god forsaken part of the Antarctic Ocean in a wild goose chase?

This case must not be laid to rest. The evil men and women must be brought to justice.

SMRT – 40 recommendations to make rail network more resilient

I read this report in the media saying 40 recommendations were made by 13 experts, four of whom were foreign experts, to improve the fault prone SMRT system. This must be expected and nothing surprising. I am not too concern about the cost unless the total amount of recommendations would be equivalent to replacing everything with a brand new system. That would be much cheaper and at least last for a few good years, and brand new some more.

The 40 recommendations mean that either the system has 40 problem areas or 40 areas that were not up to specs and thus needed to be pumped up or replaced. No wonder we have so many problems in the last few years, so many areas that needed improvement. So lucky we have these experts to look into it and could rectify these 40 problematic or potentially problematic areas.

What I am trying to find out from the recommendations by the expert is a simple answer. What is the cause or causes for the recent spate of breakdowns? My thinking is very simple. If one does not know the problem, how could one solve the problem? The 40 recommendations could be totally unrelated to the cause of the problem or maybe barely related. I still think it is important to diagnose the main cause or causes of the breakdowns if a lasting solution is to be found.

If not, the money spent may be money spent for nothing, would not help in a big way to the breakdowns. Let me give a simple example on what I am trying to drive at. A patient is in the intensive watch, dying. A team of experts went in but could not find the reason for his illness. After several weeks of diagnosis they came up with a list of recommendations. The heart specialists recommended inserting 3 stents to improve his blood flow and pressure. The kidney specialist recommended changing one kidney, the blood specialist wanted a complete blood transfusion, the knee specialist wanted to replace his knee caps, the spinal cord specialist wanted to insert a few steel discs to straighten his backbone and posture….and many other good recommendations. The critically ill patient would have practically a new body with many new parts. But the main cause or causes of his illness is still unknown.

After all the major operations, the patient remains in the intensive care unit, still in the same state of comatose.  Good intention, a lot of money spent, all for nothing. This is what I am concern about.

What do you think?

Do we have high frequency traders in SGX?

/// Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, has been at the vanguard of warning about the dangers and the rampant fraud that the rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithims have let loose in today's financial markets. .....

Of the situation that led to his award, he says:

"The folks at the NYSE were selling their direct feed for north of $30,000 a month versus the SIP which is under a thousand dollars a month. Their customers are not buying it because it has that much more rich data. The thing that makes it worth $29,000 more is that it is faster, but that is illegal. Up until this point they deny that that is the case. And somehow it works. So the exchanges make all their money from their highest paying customers which are the high frequency traders. And the high frequency traders pay the exchanges exorbitant amounts of money to have a slight advantage.

That's how the whole system works. It is absolutely, positively rigged. There is no question about it. It is rigged on many different levels in many different ways -- for example, no retail order ever gets to see the light of day of the stock exchange. That's one of the many eye openers. People who aren’t pros in the market don’t realize that it's all a rigged game. "

Hunsader also had opportunity at one point to access the audit trail data from the CME futures exchange, data that the central authorities almost never allow outside eyes to see. What he found was clear evidence that a very small number of very large players push prices and volume around at will to vacuum up profits at the expense of everyone else:

SOURCE:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/eric-hunsader-financial-system-absolutely-positively-rigged

 

This is a very important piece of information and deserves to be an article on its own so that more people can read about it.

Why would HFT traders want to pay another $29,000 pm just to be faster? The return must be much more than the $29k pm.  But this is not the only advantage, by being faster. They are not telling the whole truth and the fraud and cheating involved. Why did they said it is rigged? Who are the victims of the rig?

Who allowed this fraud to be practiced in the exchanges?

What we have is a bunch of crooks that knew what is happening but chose not to know. And we have a bunch of people kpkb about everything but the real issue, did not know what is going on. And the end result, the traders taken to the laundry and the exchanges turning into a casino that would run to a standstill in a matter of time.

This is irresponsibility at the highest level.

Elected President – A can of worms

The Constitutional Commission of wise men and a woman has opened its door for business and several wise men and wise women were invited to share their views on the task set for the Commission. What the Commission is not set up to do is to examine the primary basis for the need of an Elected President, the first assumption. In political science, the first thing we were taught to do was to examine the assumptions of a political theory. Without doing so we could be sent on a wild goose chase and feeling very happy about it, that everything is sound and right. 

It is like someone claiming that sugar is the cause of diabetes and everyone would be shouting, ‘hang the sugar’!  Get rid of sugar, ban sugar, increase sugar tax, fine people consuming too much sugar!  In politics, it could be like someone propounding the theory that dictatorship or one party is best and everyone will be going about praising dictatorship or one party and trying to make a dictatorship/one party better and betterer.

Well, since no want is going to talk about the first principle, about the first assumption, it is pointless to ask such a question. Everyone is taking for granted that the Elected President is the best thing to happen to our political system, or a motherhood that we have to live with, just like a rogue govt or a rogue president waiting to happen, hiding behind the bend.

Since this is the case, let me join the circus, oops, I mean the circle of wise men and women, to make the best of the Elected President thing. This I must again confess, I don’t think is a good idea or necessary, but a waste of public money and resources that can be put to better use. Oh, and before I go and make myself silly,… among the wise men and women that have spoken, the wisest of the wise is, I must say, the legal intern called Brian Chang. This is what he said in a simple sentence that said so much. ‘ I think we need to (be) very careful with whether we want to introduce race based criteria which do not exist at the moment into any of our political offices and if we want to take the first step down the (slippery) slope.’

This sentence alone already shows the kind of complex and multitudes of problems that will come along when ethnicity or race is embedded into our political system, in the Elected Presidency. No need to elaborate further. No one is more blind that those with eyes but could not see. It is an enormous can of worms that would start to wriggle out once it is opened. Do we want to ask for something that we cannot cope with that we don’t have to in the first place?

Ok, now that I have vented, let me get to the great silly ideas that I have been playing with, the minorities in our Elected Presidency concept. What is the meaning of minority? The original CMIO or more? How much more would we want to classify an ethnic group as a minority and eligible to have a right to be the Elected President by default, provided and protected by the Constitution? Would we be welcoming the Pinoys, the Myanmese, the Banglas, the high caste Indians, the Vietnamese, the Thais, the Indonesians and what not as our new minorities and enjoying equal rights as the MIOs, to have a right to be an Elected President?

And why stop at ethnicity, what about women as a minority, (AWARE has spoken), what about age, religion, the non meat eaters, there are many kinds of minorities in our little piece of rock.  Oooh, I forgot about the beautiful pink people. They are minorities too.

Ok, ok, this is pushing the limit too far. Let’s get back to the ethnic minorities. What is the best formula to work with? Now it is 75:15:8:2, or there about.  Can this be crafted into a scientific formula of relative representation? Or should it be a simple rule of thumb, 3C:1.5M: 1I: 0.5O?  To make this formula workable, multiply by 2 and we will get 6C:3M:2I:1O. Just ignore the new minorities until they start to protest violently.  The formula will mean over 12 terms of EP, 6 terms will go to a Chinese, 3 terms to a Malay, 2 terms to an Indian and 1 term to an Others. My apologies to call you Others, not my choice of words.  How to count if one minority president sits in the Istana for more than one term?

What about the new Others that should be added in? Should the new formula be CMIOPIMVBT? It would be quite a ‘chap cheng’ formula and quite perplexing. It may be better to reengineer the population to a point where each ethnic group is 10% and every tribe will have one term of Elected President each, very fair and very easy to manage. Next time got 20 tribes, can change formula again.

I won’t want to go further than this. It is already complicated enough. What do you think? A race embedded formula for the Elected Presidency to make sure every minority group is treated equally and fairly. Can it ever be fair? Never mind, the silly majority here is very generous and will go along with anything, with any formula, even reducing its majority status. They believe in meritocracy and excellence regardless of nationalities. You can sell them to be prostitutes and they would not mind.

Enshrining racial differences into our political holy grail? Anyone think this is a good idea?

Does anyone remember what is this?

‘We, the citizens of Singapore,
pledge ourselves as one united people,
regardless of race, language or religion,
to build a democratic society
based on justice and equality
so as to achieve happiness, prosperity
and progress for our nation’.

Please respect this national pledge. Sorry Raja, need to remind the daft and dumb about what you said, even if it is an aspiration.