Budget 2011: Yeah, Like I Understand Economics That Well

Today 2011 national budget was tabled (is 'tabled' even the correct word?). I will not waste time going into the details. As expected, and as it has been for the past 7 years of my working life, the only group of people who would be elated over national budget are:

1) Government servants, especially female, married AND pregnant (or soon-to-be).
2) Those earning less than RM3000 (and thus will not pay a single cent of income tax).
3) Those on the receiving end of the multi-billion projects.
4) UMNO-BN 'patriots' to whom the ruling regime can do no wrong; they still think we need a bigger dick to prove our manhood to the world (seriously, have we even filled up KLCC's 88 floors yet?).

This is becoming a recurring pattern. Monetarily, those who benefit from national budget are always those who are in absolute lower income bracket AND absolute higher income bracket. Middle income wage-earners pay taxes, and in return get peanuts, cheaper handphones and underwear. Ironic.

Hey, I'm no economist. I hardly understand finance and I barely get half of what Personal Money blabbers about (though I still buy it every month for tax exemption, get it?). Yet, is it so hard give middle-income people a small piece of the pie?

Consider a regular fictional Shah (bukan nama sebenar) who make RM50k per-annum. A 1% tax rebate/return/discount (to-may-to, to-mah-to) from his total income would make him an extra RM500 per-annum, equivalent to 2 months of his eldest son's kindergarten fee; or 20 1kg packs of Dutch Lady baby formula for his youngest daughter which can last 5 months; or 2 months' worth of petrol for his hungry second-hand car. Does it cost RM10 billion for this to happen? Nope. But of course, Shah is no Vincent Tan or Ananda Krishnan, and all his cables are electrical.

And don't even get me started about the patriots, zealots and parrots. The PM had barely finished his last salvo and Facebook was already on fire with praises and feel-good status updates! Ah, but who am I, an ungrateful Melayu, a 'saudagar mimpi', to challenge the wisdom of the establishment who have stood the test of time for 53 years? :-)

In the end life goes on. Tomorrow is just another day. Nothing changes. All is well... until the next GE looms, that is... xD

Nick: What's In A Name?

I am the eldest in my family. My wife too. When our children were born siblings from both sides were ecstatic.

In the olden times family members were given nicknames equivalent to their 'rank'; the firstborn by convention is Long, followed by Ngah, then Lang, Anjang, Uteh, Uda, Adik, Usu, something of this order. Apparently this is no longer 'cool' and thus my children uncles, aunts and grands came up will all sort of 'cooler', in-trend nicknames. Among interesting ones sounds like Auntie Long, Uncle B, Mak Na, Tok Burn, Ayah Sham, Tok An... you get the idea.

I never really cared for what the hordes of second cousins call me. Mostly, to them I'm Uncle Jie. That's it, until my very first nephew was born last Thursday. Suddenly I felt some kind of weird pressure of coming up with a decent 'unclish' nickname, but what would it be?

It could not be Uncle Jie. 'Keji', in Malay, means 'despicable'... can't have that for a nickname. Or Uncle D (for Dragon, of course :p ) but 'Kedi' in Malay means transvestite... er... Maybe Uncle Long, but 'Angklung' is a traditional Malayan musical instrument... reject! Or simply Pak Long, but say that too many times it would sound like 'Polong', an infamous Malayan monster/specter/ghost... ish! Certainly not Pak Ajie, that is the very image of an old man in kopiah who has been on Hajj to Makkah... nope, anything with 'Pak' would not do.

So what? I honestly don't know... yet.

Congratulations to my brother Bob (the small bird LOLxD) and wife in hitting this joyous milestone in life. It will be tough, but you will be loving it nevertheless. To newborn little bird Aqid who doesn't even have a full name yet, I welcome you to the world. In the end it doesn't matter what you call me, you are already in my 'duit raya' roster.

Majority: Is NOT Always Right

People say that democracy is the voice of the people, since the majority speaks, right? Yeah... 'right'. Believe me when I say that the voice of the majority actually doesn't even know what's good for them. It happened to me.

I recently volunteered to be in a committee to organize a team-building event for the great blue giant potato chip company I work in. There were about 13 of us committee members.

Well, the way it worked, was that we, the committee suggested 4 options for the population to vote. The first round, one of the destination was actually in a neighboring country so naturally, this option won overwhelmingly. Alas, the top management vetoed this decision due to safety and security concern as the country was in a civil unrest. 

Fine. 

Second round of voting, the winner was a famous theme-park-cum-gambling destination and the close second by about 5% less votes was local treasure hunt.

Now, do note that the difference in votes were very small. The journey to the theme park destination will take about 6 hours from here, theme park entrance fee not included, event will have to be 2 days 1 night over a weekend, participation was highly likely to be low (family concerns, wasted weekend, other plans etc etc), and it is highly likely that everyone will be doing their own thing there (there was precedent; it happened before). Free vacation for some, that's all.

On the contrary, a local treasure hunt will be a day event, on a working day where everyone can participate, highly likely 80-90% of the population will turn up (well, how do you exactly say 'I don't go to work today'?), big budget can be allocated for super cool prizes instead of paying for buses and hotel rooms, there can be t-shirts/souvenirs for everyone, and most importantly it will be a very TEAM-ORIENTED-EVENT.

Of course, the committee can always choose to do the right thing over the majority-is-always-right thing. In fact many on the committee felt that way. However, the world is not a perfect place (and I found it too ridiculous to argue against people who would not change their minds).

Today, the decision was to go to the theme-park-cum-gambling destination, and participation rate was about 55%. And we call this TEAM BUILDING?

On the grander scale, you wonder how the 'majority' (by gerrymandering, of course :p ) Government can survive all these years? Well, don't (sorry, can't resist! LOLxD ).