Hypocrisy at its best

On political values, top 3 things those surveyed want: more democratic country, world class education, reduce income gap – A recent tweet by @TheNutGraph

Just as I was blabbing to a friend of mine a few weeks ago, TNG tweeted something that’s somewhat exactly the thing we were talking about. I suppose TNG was quoting a Merdeka Canter survey.

You want a more democratic country? You blame the government for not being democratic, not listening to you, or when you say something they just put them in the spam bin. You’re doing the same thing! Whatever the government says, you treat them as a lie if they’re not in your favour. Today you quote the EC as if they’re the most honest people in the world, and tomorrow you call them liars.

You want a world class education? With the persistence of the MLM crusaders, you jumped at the slightest news about local universities. You can’t even imagine sending your kids to local universities because you think they are of lower standards. When your kids come back and they say they want to be a teacher or lecturer, you tell them no. “Lecturers are those who can’t make it in the real industry” you said.

You want smaller income gap? You don’t complain when you get that multi-million contract from the government (federal/state). “It’s because I work hard” you said. Don’t mention thousands, you don’t even care about giving RM 5 to an orphanage. You claim every single cent which you spent for the non-profit NGO you spend your time for.

Response to Shafie Jameran re: PSD scholarships

Originally posted here.
Karim Raslan’s article in The Star here.

At the risk of sounding, in the words of the brilliant Karim Raslan, ultra-conservative as well as somewhat ungrateful, I’m actually inclined towards reducing, not stopping but reducing, the number of overseas PSD as well as MARA scholarships, gradually of course. I’m all for GLCs to give overseas scholarship though.

Now, the reason why I want them to be reduced is not a financial decision in the aspect of scholarship funding, but rather the Malaysian higher education environment. IMHO, ultimately, we should not be proud if we study overseas, instead, we should be proud if we were a UM graduate, UPM graduate or a USM graduate, just as the Brits are proud with their OxBridge, just as the Americans are proud with their Ivy-leagues and just as the Australians are proud with their G8. Well of course, to be proud of our local universities, they need to be at par with the THES top50, and THAT is exactly what we should be doing. Our local universities and MOHE are working really hard towards that and we should be helping them, not patronising them.

We want future medical students to dream of Taylor’s Medical School instead of RCSI or Johns Hopkins.
We want future engineering students to dream of UPM’s Engineering Faculty instead of MIT or Imperial.
We want future economic students to dream of UM’s Economics Faculty instead of Wharton or Oxford’s Said Bus. School.
This should be our ultimate goal. Not just to flood our economy with foreign-educated workforce.

Having said that, of course we have to maintain a ‘healthy’ mix of foreign-educated as well to bring a different perspective. However, just imagine if our own universities were flooded with foreign students, not just Asians and Africans, but Americans and Europeans as well. Even better, if we’re blessed enough, they would be worrying about brain-drain to Malaysia. How much more perspective do you want then?

And let’s be honest, how many of our friends who are in Nottingham, in Dublin, in Manchester, who are not vocal, not demanding and, to a certain extent, apathetic on Malaysian issues? Blind loyalty is, of course, another issue altogether.

However, I would want to echo Karim’s thought, “It may simply be a better investment if some Malaysians are allowed to pursue higher technical or vocational education”. You won’t get underwater welding skills in universities. If you don’t know yet, you can find out how much underwater welders make and compare that to your starting pay. Even those Bangladeshis/Indonesians doing special types of roof fittings or polycarbonate roofs can get thousands for a week’s work. But then of course, it’s manual labour and it depends on the employee market condition.

So there you go, don’t phase out, just reduce, but maybe not just yet. Get the universities to buck up, and work hard to be at par, if not better than Stanford, Seoul National and Tokyo University. Then reduce the scholarships. Even MARA needs to reduce them. Just ignore PERKASA and focus on entrepreneurship.

Minyak Kereta

http://myfinancialthoughts.com/2009/09/10/ron-95-and-ron-97-and-fuel-hike/

Recently the government introduced RON 95 fuel to the mass market, which in some way upgraded the RON 97 we’ve been using all this while to a ‘premium’ fuel, and made it more expensive. I’m not sure what was the official announced reason for this but if I’m not mistaken, it was meant to lessen the people’s burden taking into considerations the rising oil price at that time. Some might have the perception that we are using a lower quality fuel right now since the number at the nozzle is lower and it’s cheaper, so it must be of lower quality isn’t it? Wrong. At least in my limited knowledge of the oil industry. The cheaper fuel doesn’t necessarily translate into lower performance, it doesn’t reduce your fuel efficiency, and alas, it doesn’t provide less power for the Kancil Turbo we often find overtaking the Camry and Accord (to a certain extent the 3 series and C-Class) on Malaysian highways. So yes 2-litre car owners, you’ll still be staring at the Kancil’s behind.

Anyway, back to the people’s perception. As I’ve mentioned earlier, it is not of a lower quality. It’s just something to do with something which I couldn’t effectively make you understand here or anywhere else for that matter. Please consult someone with an Engineering degree or someone from Shell or Exxon (you know who you are). According to Wikipedia here, most parts of the world use the RON 95 or lower as their regular fuel, any higher would be premium fuel or in layman’s term, expensive fuel. Do you know what does this mean? The fuel that we used before was the expensive one!! Damn government. This amounts to daylight robbery! Why didn’t they just give us the cheap fuel since day 1? Didn’t they expect people would be mad at them? I don’t know, maybe they have a reason for that, valid or not, justified or not, you have to go ask them yourself. I don’t know.

That was just the introduction. Just to let you know that we were paying a relatively low price for our fuel considering its ‘premium’ (maybe not if you also take into account the thickness of your pockets).

I want to pose a question to all of the bright economist out there, yes that includes you Dann, is the fuel subsidy justified? I can recall my A Level Economics teacher, Mr Jamal (who apparently just opened up a Facebook account here) announced to the class that fuel subsidy is bad. Why you might ask. Fuel subsidy is pretty much similar to regressive tax. The government is paying more for those who consume more ie; well-off people who can afford the 4.5l Cayenne, and not those who only use the 1.6l Satria Neo. Take for example a Cayenne, they use RM500/month for fuel and a Satria who only uses RM200/month. Yes the Cayenne’s owner pay more, but the government is also paying more for them. Say the subsidy is 20% from the selling price, that would mean the government is paying RM100 per month for the Cayenne and a puny RM40 for the Satria, those who need it the most. Now you can see how, in Malaysia, being rich makes you richer and being poor makes you poorer (corruption and cronyism isn’t part of today’s discussion).

By lifting the fuel subsidy, the government was actually doing justice for the people but of course we saw there was a huge protest about it. Although it was economically right, but not so populist and if we want to find fault, we can find it even here such as where would the saved money be spent and so on. Anyway, this is not to defend nor to blame the government, it’s just to satisfy my curiousity.

ps: This might be provide better and further explanation http://welkerswikinomics.com/blog/2009/09/29/letting-markets-work-the-malaysia-fuel-subsidy-goes-bye-bye/