What does this mean, wise one ? Does this mean that by engaging monsterball you have considered him to be your equal ? Or does this mean that you are making an exception to respond to him, and that you think monsterball is a lesser mortal ?

Talking to the wise one always makes my head spin, and I guess I am not worthy.

Today at 15: 30.20 (6 hours ago)
Wah Lau Eh, Limkamput, I ask one question, and I get 35 questions in return. I don’t talk about pump priming. I only said that the government pumps us …”

There is another kind of pumping that you don’t want to go into early in the morning. I know it is night over in Malaysia.

Today at 18: 33.07 (3 hours ago)
Precisely right on all three points i.e. (a) trublumsian gave a wrong answer, (b) only Limkamput has the right answer and (c) the rest of us are half-baked.

Wow ! 3 out of 3 !

——————–

Yep. When you do not know the answer it works sometimes to tick “All of the above”.

How do you think Limkaput got his GMAT score of 720 which qualified him to apply to Harvard. But rather than rubbed shoulders with the best and the finest, it is a credit to the guy that he decided instead to apply to the nearest community college.

Some say that meat cow is a good choice of animal species because T-Bone Steak can fetch a high sales value. Others say that meat cow is not better than dairy cow because Hindu and Buddhist population don’t take beef therefore the market demand is limited. Some say that dairy cow consumes high quantity of expensive feed therefore the return on investment may not justify the heavy capital expenditure, not to mention the intense competition from Australia and New Zealand. Some recommend meat goat to be the livestock choice but others say that meat goat only gives birth to two kids at one birth on average and the meat yield of 45% is too low to justify the high feeding cost. Moreover, the farmer will most likely incur loss because the lacklustre mutton retail price usually falls below the breakeven price level.

Then comes a person who suggests pig to be the farmed animal because according to him, a mother hog can give birth to 22 heads of baby hogs at one birth. The high fertility seems to give a high productivity gain and a hopeful high value-added vision upon the harvest of the grown up hogs. However, no one will be able to get the pig rearing business kicked off because the government has made it a public policy to freeze the pig rearing license due to religious reason and hygienic reason.

In the end, all blames will be put on the government because the government rules and regulations would have killed any possibly viable economic activity right at the very beginning before the prospective investors have been given an opportunity to give it a trial. Of course, the government rules and regulations I mention here should also include the TAXATION to be imposed on the future profit of the investors!

What about giving the farmer full discretion to make his own choice of personal preference? The so-called laissez faire system should work, some say. However, there will be plenty of people of certain interested group coming up to say “No, laissez faire system is unfair to the have-nots and we want social justice and economic equality as stipulated in the New Economic Policy (NEP)!”

In the end, no one will be able to do any contribution to the grandeur of a well-written plan by truly improving the real productivity gain because everyone has been wasting time being bogged down in the argument on the preferred investment choice.

Pak Lah’s multi-corridors proposal serves as the best example of the policy choice dilemma in Malaysia.

KuLi fails (due to it being a sensitive issue) to mention to causes leading to how Malaysia got stuck in the middle, neither low cost nor hi-tech.

NEP and various discriminatory policies to ‘level the playing field’ have lead to hordes of talented Non-Malays leaving the country taking away much needed talent (on top of discouraging foreign talent from coming).

The non-malays being traditionally more affluent would naturally be more educated and therefore in the past provided the talent for much of the more skilled and professional jobs.

UMNO implemented various discriminatory policies to ‘break’ the (perceived) monopoly that the non-Malays had on such lucrative high paying jobs. Unfortunately for them, this did NOT magically translate to Malays being able to rise up to take on these jobs.

At the end of the day, proper professional education and training was the ONLY way for the Malays to rise up to such jobs. Unfortunately, UMNO again devised a crafty plan to print degrees and certificates certified by local government run universities that claimed such individuals were ‘qualified’ for such jobs.

However, private companies refused to accept the majority of such individuals. So again the crafty UMNO set up various government linked ‘private’ companies and employed these ‘professionals’. UMNO politicians (like Dr. M) then proceed to claim that their social re-engineering experiment was a complete success and the Malays had been uplifted from poverty.

And so Malaysia arrives to where it is today. If is not by a stroke of bad luck or chance that Malaysia is being squeezed in the middle. We are stuck because we have a glut of middle income citizens that are not willing to work for for abysmally low pay or do the dirtier less glamorous jobs, but yet neither do they have the true training, knowledge and professional exposure to rise out from the middle to the higher end and high tech jobs.

Many of the non-Malays (and even Malays) that had the true talent and training to rise up as great leaders in various fields had gotten tired of being held back in the name of providing ‘equal’ opportunity and ‘fair chance’ for the ‘less fortunate’ and had already decided to leave the country for greener pastures where they were allowed to develop their talent to the fullest.

Solution? There is no short term solution in sight for Malaysia. Malaysia has gained excessive flab from the various ‘grand’ (shortcut) plans of UMNO. The only way is to get back to the basics of building a strong healthy nation. To attempt another shortcut ‘grand’ plan would be disastrous.

The leaders refuse to admit that many of their policies in the past were a complete failure (policies dating back even prior to 1997). They refuse to admit so because they were the same ones who championed these policies back then claiming they alone knew what was best for the country.

I would like to add that it is the Malaysian people themselves that allowed those leaders to run wild with the country doing whatever the felt like, bending the rules to their liking without realizing that the natural laws of cause and effects would catch up to them.

Article 1

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011002236_2.html

The article above (last paragraph on the 2nd has more details), indicates there is a network of companies in Malaysia aiding Iran to get banned US technology.

Article 2

In a rather longish article in the New York Times, I came across a reference to a Malaysia company, the Malaysian Smelting Co. this is a company listed on the KLSE but it looks like the majority shareholders are Singaporeans.

The relevant page is below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/world/africa/16congo.html?pagewanted=4

on the 2nd last paragraph on this page, it implies that Malaysian Smelting Company is buying Tin from international brokers who source from the conflict zone in Congo.

the exact extract is :-

The flights land in Goma, the provincial capital, where other middlemen buy and process the ore for export. Alexis Makabuza’s Global Mining Company is one of these buyers. Amid the sorting and cleaning equipment of his rudimentary processing plant sit dozens of barrels of tin ore. On each is stenciled the address of Malaysian Smelting Company Berhad, a major tin smelter. Mr. Makabuza said he sold to the company via a minerals broker.

Further reference to Malaysian companies buying tin from warlords in the Congo is here from the BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7723988.stm

The extract from the BBC article is below :-

Located predominantly in India, China, Malaysia and Thailand, these smelters sell tin to component manufacturers.

So while Malaysian Smelting Co buys from an international broker, it can request that they not source from Congo. If you read the entire article you will realise that buying these ore’s are only lining the pockets of these warlords and destabilising the country.

I e-mailed the company but they have not replied. I would have not replied too in similar circumstances.

Wow ! 3 out of 3 !