e pur si muove

This week’s Youtube Monday is the Complaints Choir of Helsinki, where it seems all the possible bitchy complaints from people all over town were compiled into a massive choral tapestry of angst. The artists responsible are Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and the music was composed by Esko Grundström.

If you liked this, you might be interested in the Complaints Choir of Birmingham, although I prefer the Helsinki one. The artists are also proposing a Complaints Choir of Singapore; are there any takers?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been unseasonably warm these past 2 weeks, with daytime temperatures in the delicious 15-20°C range, and lots of sunshine to make up for the insanely short days. (It’s now getting dark at 4:10 p.m.)

But tomorrow’s weather forecast reads “Light morning rain followed by an icy mix”. Sounds more like a drink recipe, if you ask me.

sm

Oolong the Rabbit balances a smaller toy version of himself on top of a pancake on his head.

Harvard professor Michael Porter, head of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School, recently addressed the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. A recent article on TODAY¹ shows his reiteration of the “it’s time to try something new” theme. Rather than quote the entire article (which is worth reading by the way), I will summarize it as follows²

The bottom line is that the “old formula won’t work any more”: historically important drivers of growth have already reached a reasonable peak in terms of contributing to economic developement, or (worse) are passé and cannot be relied on.

The traditional factors of growth covered were:

1. Foreign direct investment (FDI): in soliciting large multinationals, SMEs (small and medium enterprises) have been neglected.
2. (International) trade: for every dollar produced in Singapore’s GDP, foreign trade contributes $3.69.
3. Efficiency-driven business practices.
4. Government-driven resource mobilization and top-down economic development policies.
5. Focus on goods, rather than services.

Porter goes on to state the obvious³, that

We need the private sector to start initiating things for itself because that’s the only way to be fundamentally successful.

The efficiency angle is also worth noting. With rising cost of living comes natural price pressure to increase salaries, and hence cost of labor. Government manipulation via mandating wage freezes, setting the trend with public sector wages, and tinkering around with CPF contribution percentages can only go so far to control the cost of labor; already people are getting the feeling of being shortchanged and woefully underpaid. But we are stuck in the uneasy liminal régime of being too expensive for low-level button-pressing, wrench-turning manual labor, but being severely inadequate in managing the “high-value” jobs that require quick thinking, flexibility and risk-taking. Porter states this as

Singapore understands it can no longer compete on being an efficient place in order to do business. Increasingly, it has to be a knowledge-based, differentiation-based, innovation-based economy. That’s a very challenging transition[...]

In a previous era, it may have been your efficiency and your cost structure. Today, increasingly it’s the skill and education level of your workforce that allows you to compete for high-value (sic) activity that pays a good wage.

All in all, a sobering message for policymakers and the Singaporean workforce. For the policymakers, it’s to step aside, stop the Keynesian madness and go all-out to nurture the long-neglected domestic economy. For laborers, it’s upgrade your skills set⁴ or perish under the auspices of Social Darwinism.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Derrick Da Paulo, Bigger strides on smaller legs, TODAY, November 29, 2006.↩
2. Considering that it’s a third-hand summary, this should be considered far from authoritative. But in the absence of a speech recording or transcript, this is perhaps the best I can do for now.↩
3. In the sense that if the government can no longer be the primary engine of growth, then that only leaves the private sector.↩
4. If not actually learn something in the process, then at least get paper qualifications to get one out of a slower salary track.↩

Once in a while, you feel like life is drab. Then there’s news like these that work like perker-uppers:

• Former House speaker Newt Gingrich wants to throw out the First Amendment, voiding the right to free speech in the country that made it famous in the first place. « /. And all in the name of counterterrorism. Looks like not all Republicans have realized that the War on Terror rhetoric has already worn too thin: it’s already cost them both chambers of Congress, what more does this philanderer want?
• Someone bought 150 cheese wheels to earn 75,000 frequent-flyer miles. Too bad it’s still more expensive than the 1.2 million miles purchased with a certain chocolate pudding promotion a few years ago. Perhaps fittingly, the cheese company responsible for the current deal has the cheesy logo: “Cheese is milk on its way to infinity.”
• Physicists have discovered a way to control magnetic vortices using weak magnetic fields. Instead of intense magnetic fields strong enough to warp shopping carts, levitate frogs and turn steel watches into fatal projectiles, the field strengths used are more comparable to tame fridge magnets. This odd phenomenon of having frozen swirls of magnetic flux lines (you can think of them as storing magnetic energy) and being able to toggle them to point in either of two directions already has Nature editors excited about potential data storage applications.
• Xerox, the company that brought us the GUI, reinvents the printing process. They’ve invented a new paper which can be printed on, with ink built into the paper, but the print lasts for only 16 hours. They’re thinking of the environmental effect of having less printed one-time reads like emails; I’m thinking of the awesome espionage potential.

Read the rest of this entry »