1/21/2014

American’s cheap drone war

The Americans have been fighting wars after wars non stop since WW2, and often several wars at the same time. They have learnt valuable lessons in the areas of strategies, tactics and cost effectiveness. The latest concept is drone wars.
The Americans must have taken quite a toll in the lost of expensive aircraft and lives of pilots, even though they have so many available, that using expensive aircraft and risking the lives of pilots are a no go and very costly in all fronts.
 

The cheap drones are safe and effective. The expensive leading edge technology of the best, most sophisticated and most advanced and most expensive fighters are just for show, a PR job to demoralize the enemy. The real war is fought by drones. The days of Battle of Britain and having the fastest and best aircraft for air superiority is over. Today there are cruise missiles and anti aircraft missiles that would make sophisticated and expensive aircraft irrelevant.
 

There is nothing secretive or surprising about the F35s. It is another con game that only a super power with bottomless funds can afford to play. Who are we bluffing that we need the most sophisticated and problem plagued and most expensive fighter aircraft when drones will do? Why do we need the most expensive aircraft to fight who? And don’t forget, to fly such sophisticated aircraft we need near supermen and women to operate them. Putting an idiot or monkey on the pilot seat will not do justice to such a piece of technology shit. At that speed the intelligence level and reaction time falls drastically and put on a lot of stress on the pilots. A super aircraft is only as good as the technicians and the quality of the pilots. Lousy technicians and pilots would undermine the capability that was paid for.
 

In the case of drones, you can fly them by school children with fast fingers on the ground. Warfare has moved on and the Americans know what they are doing. Are we still stuck in our old mindset of fighting wars with pilots and more and more sophisticated machines when the Americans have abandoned such a military strategy?
 

With the money to be spent on sophisticated piloted aircraft, we can have a few hundreds or thousands of drones or cruise missiles at our disposal. And training the boys and girls to fly them would be a piece of cake, with practically no war casualty. On the defensive part there are the famous and highly rated Patriot Missile System or the even better Iron Dome of Israel to take down the best fighter aircraft.
 

What is the better war strategy? Ask the Americans why they are using drones instead. In many ways, the F35 is another Ponzi Scheme to make the participants in the programme pay and pay when they have already committed money out front and very painful to cut losses at this point in time.

Kopi level - Green

1/20/2014

Susie Lingham – Nurturing a local talent

In the realms of the esoterics, an area called arts, the big names are often Europeans. The big galleries and museums are managed and fronted by big European names. The few big local names in arts are generally confined to music and dance. We do have a few painters of international standing.
 

The gurus or regents of running art houses and museums are never Singaporeans. Fortunately in this area, we have not sold ourselves cheap by importing foreign talents except for one, if I am not mistaken. The National Museum, the National Art Gallery and the National Heritage Board are all helmed by locals. Cannot imagine the National Heritage Board being helmed by a foreigner. But it looks quite natural given our colonial history to have an angmoh to sit there, even if he is 30 year old who did not know what colonial Singapore was. We were once owned by angmohs and so it becomes a natural right of passage of sort to have an angmoh to look authentic or international.
 

Good God, they appointed a local lass in Susie Singham to head the Singapore Arts Museum. I am sure there must be thousands of better qualified foreigners with great CVs, authentic ones I am sure, to put Susie Singham in a corner. The decision to put Susie there must be a national one, one of pride and confidence that we are as good as the best in the world. How else are we going to have a good representation in this field if we keep hiring foreigners to screw the local talents? The locals will have no chance to be trained, to gain the experience and credentials to write in their CVs that they have taken such an appointment.
 

I hope our local institutions will take the cue from our arts institutions to go local and nurture out local talents to be there with the best in the world. If we don’t train our locals, if we don’t give them a chance, who will?
 

The painful part is to place a foreign fake to helm our national institutions and deprive our own from having a go at these positions. New pink ICs are just as sick and fake.
Hope the daft in charge are taking the hints and do not be stubborn to go foreign to prove how inadequate and incompetent they are. It would not be funny for MOM to turn out a few foreign fakes at the highest level and kicking local asses.
 

By the way, the title of an article on Susie Singham by Huang Lijie is titled, ‘A heart for the arts’. Luckily the heart is in the right place and not misplaced.

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