Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

A commenter left this under The Temasek Review’s report on the school fee hike for PRs in order to hype up a sense of exclusivity of citizenship. I find this so apt. If you treat your own people badly, what makes you think that the new people you’ve attracted would think about coming under your wing?

The Goatherd And The Wild Goats

A Goatherd, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold.

He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains.

The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd.

One of them, turning about, said to him: “That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves.”

[Comment on Temasek Review's article on measure to hike school fees for PRs]

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General

From Techcrunch’s article about the fallen partnership between Fusion Garage, and themselves:

We didn’t learn about this until last Summer because Singapore media, including blogs, are largely controlled by the government. Embarrassing stuff just isn’t reported.

I’m a Singaporean, I blog. Therefore, my blog must largely be controlled by the government.

Now, why the hell am I paying for my web hosting? The government should be paying for it, since they are controlling what I’m writing. Oh yes, and I’m being controlled to say that “Michael Arrington sucks!”

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General

It doesn’t have to be to put them out of power. yaevlejunce’s article succinctly summarises the arguments for voting against the PAP in the next elections.

I, for one am keeping my vote a secret. Privacy mah.

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General

Going back to army produces this fundamental shift in your core being as to make you a less effective thinker. I mean, who else walks to the SAF e-mart, purchases some running shorts, queues up, pays for it, leaves the e-mart, goes to the canteen for teh-bing, and then goes back to the e-mart to buy running t-shirts?

I mean, it is perfectly reasonable to expect a person to report to location A, board a vehicle to location B, retrieve certain equipment, return to location A, wait for something to happen, board vehicle to location B again to return the equipment, then board the vehicle back to location A again, and then leave for home from there. Isn’t it?

Engaging the mental faculty while inside reservist has its use, and is needed if the entire platoon just wants to finish everything, and then go back up to bunk to sleep. I, for one dread thinking whenever I go back. Because the first thing that comes to my mind is the utter grit and dirt of jungle activities. The sweat and dirt really gets to you if you allow it to creep in to your mind, because that’s almost all you really can think of when you’re spending hours outside in the field.

Gu-niang-ness aside, thinking about it just causes me to yearn for the clean and breezy bed at home (or even back in bunk). Keep it up for a few hours, and it is enough to drive a sane person crazy. So, to maintain a healthy mind, many of us switch off mentally while we’re out in the field.

The trouble comes when reservist ends, and I have to re-engage my gears for work. Hell, it’s real work that I’m being paid for, and my passion; but keeping the brain on brakes for one week would have really created a metaphorical hurdle for me to cross. And that hurdle is the inertia that’s keeping me from really getting up to speed. I expect to shake off the sluggish feeling soon with enough time, and dive back in to the flow of things back at work, but it’s really, really uncomfortable to be shifting gears like that.

Thankfully, reservist comes once a year; if it came more often than that, I’m going to have to change my handling strategies. Maybe bitch about reservist more on my blog.

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General

It’s that time of the year, and I’m not referring to Christmas.

That’s because it’s time to wear green and stop thinking again

Ah… Wait, I’m in reservist, so why should I stop thinking? I can think about what food and games to bring in to play next week. Someone’s already bringing Saboteur, so what can I bring? Any suggestions?

My major agenda for this in-camp training is to pass my IPPT. Because I sure as hell don’t want to go for RT. Imagine dragging yourself down to one of the three RT centres located far away from civilisation, immediately after work? No thanks, that would really kill me.

To prepare, I’ve been doing 2.4km runs 3 times a week, although my timings are still too damn poor. I’ve also switched to a new running route, because I hope that a change in scenery will signify a new start? I don’t know. I did a manual measurement of the distance once (it’s a 3-lap of a 4 minute-a-lap route), which brings it up to approximately 2.4 km.

Erm. I hope.

Because my last timing was 12 min 56sec, and I really, really hope that I’ve been covering at least the full 2.4km. Short of running on a stadium track, there’s absolutely no way for me to know.

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General

I’m upset at this letter in today’s forum pages:

Ministry: MP Low wrong on lift upgrading

I REFER to last Saturday’s letter by Member of Parliament for Hougang Low Thia Khiang, ‘No basis for MP not to announce lift upgrading’.

The joint letter last Friday by the Housing and Development Board (HDB) and the People’s Association (‘Why grassroots advisers announce lift upgrading’) should be read in conjunction with Minister for National Development Mah Bow Tan’s explanation to the media last Wednesday.

As Mr Mah highlighted, HDB’s upgrading programmes are carried out and funded by the Government. This is no different from other government programmes such as the building of roads and schools.

These programmes have to be implemented through government channels. In the case of HDB upgrading, this channel is the advisers to grassroots organisations, who are appointed by the Government. Opposition MPs are not answerable to the Government, nor are they obliged to carry out and explain the Government’s policies.

The Government pays up to 90 per cent of the cost of the Lift Upgrading Programme (LUP), with the rest shared between the residents (5 per cent) and the town councils (5 per cent). Funding for LUP is possible only because of the Government and the Budget surpluses it has generated through prudent policies.

Opposition MPs are not responsible for generating budget surpluses. There is therefore no basis for opposition MPs to lead the LUP – a national programme funded mainly by the Government. Mr Low is mistaken when he cites the ‘will of the people’ expressed in general elections to justify why he should play a leading role in the LUP in Hougang. The will of the people expressed in general elections is to elect a government for the country as a whole; and not to elect separate local governments for each constituency.

Singapore has a one-level system of government. MPs, whether People’s Action Party or opposition, do not constitute a local government in their constituency.

However, MPs do have a role in running town councils. Their role in town management and maintenance is clearly defined in the Town Councils Act, and does not extend to implementing government programmes such as the LUP.

Lim Yuin Chien
Press Secretary to the
Minister for National Development

In it, the secretary mentions that the opposition MPs are not qualified to head the upgrading programme because:

1. The opposition MPs do not have credit in helping the government create a budget surplus.
2. The opposition MPs are not answerable to the government.
3. The upgrading programme is a government programme, and it is up to the government to appoint its agent.

The secretary also clarifies that the votes cast in the general elections are to:

1. Elect a government of state as a whole, instead of for separate local governments in each ward.
2. Elect a Member of Parliament in each ward for the purpose of town management and maintenance as defined by the Town Councils Act.

I call bullshit on this letter.

The opposition MPs do not have credit in helping the government create a budget surplus.

Firstly, it is the executive branch of the government’s job to run the country and manage the state’s funds. There is no way that any MPs, PAP or not, would be able to influence or command in any form, how the Cabinet manages the funds, except at the annual Budget debate. Thus, this point is a red herring.

The opposition MPs are not answerable to the government.

It is interesting to read about the second point. Why are Member of Parliaments supposed to be answerable to the government, when it’s actually the other way round? The government cabinet is accountable to the people via their elected representatives in Parliament; and for Hougang and Potong Pasir, it is Mr Low Thia Kiang and Mr Chiam See Tong.

The upgrading programme is a government programme, and it is up to the government to appoint its agent.

Another red herring. Surely if the government is all about accountability, it can appoint its own agent to helm the project; but is it so untenable to have the ward’s elected MP make the project announcement? Is it so hard to have the agent work with the elected MP just because he is a member of the opposition party?

Elect a government of state as a whole, instead of for separate local governments in each ward.

Wrong again. The General Elections are meant for the people to elect their representatives into Parliament. When the representatives have been elected, the President invites the majority party to form the government, consisting of elected Member of Parliaments. The government as a whole is being elected, but not directly.

I’m not opposed to the government appointing its own agent to head the project, but the agent should be working with the elected MP to conduct the works, despite his party affiliation. In this situation, the two MPs have been lobbying for many years to have their wards upgraded. When it finally comes, the people to announce the upgrades are the 2 losing PAP candidates for the wards; and the way it is portrayed makes it seem as if they were the ones who were responsible for getting the HDB to change its policy.

In fact, much of the outcry on this issue has always been on why the MPs are not the ones to announce the projects, when the government knows consciously that Mr Low Thia Kiang and Mr Chiam See Tong have been the ones most vocal and active about this issue. It’s very much a side-lining of the two politicians, as much as I can see from here. This letter appears to explain the situation, where in fact it is a distraction from the actual question that we have been asking:

Why aren’t the elected Member of Parliaments for Hougang and Potong Pasir the ones announcing the lift upgrades?

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Current Affairs

I’ve been wondering if I should close down this blog.

At first, I committed to writing a new post every day, if not about my life in the army, or my working life, or my schooling life; but I’ve been writing less frequently. Furthermore, this blog isn’t generating money at all, and the amount of benefit it brings to world isn’t as much as I would have wanted to.

I’m considering the possibility of converting this into an online magazine for fellow student computer programmers. This effectively excises my reflections and posts of my life from the blog, but I would probably just bring those over to some other publishing platform that makes it easier to do those kind of posts.

What do you think?

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General

Very, very worrying. I’ve been struggling to learn and use Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for a major re-write of our application for the hospital. There’s lots of new things to learn, weird behaviours to discover and work-around, and a self-imposed 5 Oct deadline to finish it.

I wake up in the afternoon, and face the monitor screen with absolutely no direction on how to get what I want done. Should I use a canvas for the slide-out menu? Should I use a grid instead? Both exhibit weird and undocumented behaviour which I don’t discover until I take the plunge, and start coding. And then only after I get the majority of that feature up working, I find a show-stopping behaviour, and I would need to tear everything down, and start over again.

If it’s just once or twice, or if I had all the time in the world, I would have simply treated this as a learning experience. But the high hopes placed within this project has caused me a lot of hand-wringing, and there is so much internal and external pressure that I’ve gone beyond thinking about it. It’s just mind-numbing paralysis as I search the Internet for non-existent documentation on WPF quirks.

The result being that I’m quite drained and disillusioned. I look at the plans I’ve drawn up, and being forced to reduce them more and more. These failures are getting quite trying for me, that I’m beginning to doubt my own ability to code. Seriously, I’m starting to think that the problem is with me.

I really, really need to get away from it all. I’m weary.

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