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Saturday, June 01, 2013 - 22:08 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Three Parter


"Serving The Nation"

"I've no ammunition. What use are cartridges in battle?
I always carry chocolate instead;
and I finished the last cake of that yesterday."

- Lao Jiao Man, Arms and the Man, G.B. Shaw



(Original source: elthamlittletheatre.org.au)


That's the first week of this year's ICT done with. It was fine, I suppose. Much of the same - a lot of waiting around, and a sense that one is not doing all that much, but that's the army for you, there's quite a bit of slack built in (for good reason). It could have been more enjoyable had I the knack of making easy conversation and small talk, but the trouble is that much of that seems to be a matter of going with the flow, something I am emphatically not good at (I prefer to swear on my own terms, for one), particularly if it involves expressing opinions that I don't actually believe in.

There was something to be said for the relief I felt when another guy addressed me simply by my vocation - he did his job, I did mine, make life easy for each other, time passed. All so simple.

Oh, there were the little things to appreciate - being free to watch leaves sway in the wind and ants crawl on stems (like I apparently loved to do when I was young) for maybe half an hour, for one, quite impossible if I had access to a computer (by the way, smartphones are now allowed - I frankly don't get why they're discriminating by size, though, they're all mini general-purpose computers nowadays). Then there's the increased appreciation of my regular job factored in, too.

I have to admire some of the camaraderie that I witnessed, even if I found it hard to truly fit in - such bonds can be rare these days. I also have to express my appreciation for the guys who manage to crack jokes at almost any opportunity. Every large group, particularly in the military, could do with at least a few of them to break the tedium and tension.

One more message I got was that positivity is not an infinite resource, and that throwing mine into the equivalent of a black hole for the past decade has been mildly discouraging, to say the least. 了解了, 人终究是现实的. 没有什么大不了的.

The trouble with trying to suppress desire through philosophy is that it could work - but if it did for even that, why not everything else? Emptiness stares back, even if there might be a consolation prize that could be valuable if properly used and constantly evaluated. In a way, I envy those that manage to believe one thing in the morning, and every bit as sincerely take an opposed stand before the night is out, without being hampered by the curse of knowing it. Then, one bows or suffers, but there is suffering in bowing for me too. For what were we ever, without those things called dreams?

Note: the verdict in the sex-for-grades case has just arrived, and was as expected. That said, it was more the callousness of the defendant towards his student after her pregnancy that turned me off. Elsewhere, our former SCDF commissioner went down too, leaving the former CNB chief the only one to buck the trend (though it probably didn't do his career much good), the difference being that his was a genuine long-running affair. So let this be a lesson - if you're gonna do it, first establish a reliable track record as insurance.


Basic Doctrine

"People, by nature, I think we are all tribal in many ways."

- a Minister talks sense, deigns to consider solution


Of course, the army being what it is, it was incredible at times to watch the difference between the public and private personae of my fellow servicemen, as deduced from phone calls, unavoidably overheard (well, it's not like I could be expected to plug my ears). It's just business, SAFO, I guess.

This hasn't stopped the really high-ups from wanting to "strengthen NS", hot on the heels of the frankly imbecilic NS Tax suggestion. The only way that that would be equitable would be to open the offer to citizens too, and if the rationale for not allowing that is that it would be unfair and biased against the poor... well, how does the original offer look now? Indeed, I am again kind of curious on the take-up rate of a tax option.

[N.B. Interestingly, Singapore might now be the country with the most onerous service requirements, on balance. Taiwan is now cutting theirs down to four months, South Korea remains at two years with a reserve obligation of six to eight years, while Israel's service term is three years but with a relatively high non-participation rate of near 28% (projected to rise to 60% by 2020, supposedly) - and the latter two actually have enemies that are openly out to kill them!]

This was followed by a call to "make NS meaningful for every recruit", by a garang soldier who was disappointed at being detailed to take charge of logistics (though in my opinion, that is a meaningful undertaking too - an army marches on its stomach, all said)

Personally, I don't see much hope of that - not everyone can expect to be a defence research scientist for NS, after all. Come on, military posts aren't designed for self-actualization, or so that the guy who gets saddled with it will like it - they're created towards the fulfilment of some objective, frequently the making of some other poor bastard die for his country. I can assure you that most of the fellows slogging it up a muddy hillside with a rifle at the ready, wouldn't generally be doing it on their weekends off when they have a choice.

The writer bemoans conscripts being "plugged into manpower gaps", but that's exactly what an army is supposed to be about; if you're trained to be a tank driver, you, well, drive a tank. You would take instructions from the guy they assign as the tank commander, and probably wouldn't even have to communicate with any gunners and loaders. That's it. Nobody gives a heck if your true interests lie in making pastries, illustrating manuscripts or tallying numbers (come to think of it, I was probably already pretty fortunate in this respect)

One might then ask, what exactly are we defending against? One opinion is water, with the mechanism being "forward defence" (it's on Wikipedia, no biggie), which basically involves pushing up north, if only to prevent the conflict being lost by simple artillery shelling. Of course, I would expect that our friends on the other side of the border would know that too, and seek to blow up the Causeway and Second Link posthaste; sadly, in modern warfare, attacking fixed targets is usually a lot easier than defending them.

The bad news then is that Singapore is one (not-that) huge fixed target. If we piss someone with a nuke, and the wherewithal to deliver it, off badly enough... let's just say it's game over. Millions would perish, and there would, well, not be much left to protect. The worse news is that a nuke is hardly required - a conventional bombing run, or even a few big explosives on the MRT, might be enough to send enough investments fleeing to cripple the economy.

The good news is that wars are usually fought on the basis of "what's in it for me?", as many peoples who happen to be sitting on hydrocarbons have discovered to their detriment. In our case, there is a rather low bar to the amount of force that can be used, before most of the value of getting the land is lost. Though to be honest, I can hardly see us independently running operations that stretch for much longer than months, even if successful. There are just too many weaknesses, keeping supply lines open for one.

In practice, if there's serious business, it's probably be holding out till Uncle Sam's Seventh Fleet rolls in, assuming that they still like us enough (then again, the UK liked us a lot during WW2, but once they had problems of their own, it's just too bad). But then again, would either Malaysia or Indonesia, our closest neighbours, really benefit from armed conflict? Granted that good sense sometimes goes out of the window in the military, and sabre-rattling, scapegoating and adventurism is always popular with politicians especially in times of crisis, but I suspect that they are rather more interested in staying in power - that I don't see this sort of war particularly helping to do.


Employment Explained

[Disclaimer: The following was inspired by an article on TR Emeritus. While the justifications behind their critiques are of very mixed quality, some, like this, do merit investigation]


With the local news doubling down on how our employment rates are among the world's best (note: it seems that National Service is considered employment, and that plenty of male citizens would still be in tertiary education by the youth category cutoff age of 24 years old due to that), it seems an opportune time to inspect these claims.

On one hand, it seems like there's nothing much to say about unemployment - we have a rate of about 3%, which simply means that just 3% of adults don't have a job. Which is great, right?

Yes... and no, because there's a small catch - unemployment technically applies only to those that are actively looking for work. In other words, the guy who's sitting at home because he's given up looking for a job isn't unemployed; he's economically inactive. Big difference.

Seen in this light, it could firstly be noted that talking about unemployment without talking about the labour force participation rate might not be too meaningful. From latest statistics, this is 66.6% for us, leaving about 64.6% of adults actually gainfully employed.

A concrete example might be illuminating. Consider the United Kingdom, which has an unemployment rate of near 8%, which seems to mean that Singapore is two and a half times better that our former colonial masters. Atta boy, eh, mate?

But just a minute there. First off, if we're talking about overall labour participation rate, the UK is at about 62%, and some 80% for those of working age (a level that appears to have been stable for a long time). This implies that 57% of adults are gainfully employed there. Less than 64.6%, to be sure, but not by too much.

On to the next question - is high labour force participation and low employment necessarily good? This may sound like a dumb thing to ask, given how often our low unemployment rate has been trumpted in the local media. But let us clear our mind of preconceptions, and look at the raw data. It turns out that neither labour force participation nor employment are a good indicator of how desirable a country is to live in (at least when the figures are not too extreme)

Indeed, third world countries are disproportionately represented among those with very high participation rates of over 70%. Employment rates are a mixed bag too, with the likes of Cambodia, Papua New Guinea (no disrespect intended) and North Korea having lower unemployment.

Now, what does a high labour force participation and low unemployment mean? One possible answer is that people are being forced to work out of necessity. Consider two hypothetical countries A and B. In Country A, the average worker stays in school until his early twenties, marries his sweetheart who becomes a housewife and raises a few kids, retires at 62, and pursues his own interests before expiring at 82. In Country B, his counterpart starts work at 17 and never quite stops, having to wipe tables well into his seventies.

From the perspective of employment rates, Country B would be far superior to Country A - but why would a worker want to live there? I can understand the importance of a work ethic, but harping on low employment seems suspiciously like being proud of staying in the office for longer hours (another area in which we are tops, mind), instead of being proud of what is achieved in that time (i.e. productivity, an area not even the local media could spin to our advantage); it's like a farmer boasting of how many times he smashes his hoe into the soil, instead of how many bushels he harvests.

Another angle to consider is that of underemployment. Employment statistics say nothing at all about how much they are earning - the S$500/month intern was certainly employed, but that's no way to live. In fact, our wage share has been revealed to be lower than average... but hey, 3% unemployment is 3% unemployment. Not to say that this is a bad place to be, but it would be much appreciated for the mass media to present the whole picture instead of being a mouthpiece for incumbent soundbite headlines. Then again, that's their raison d'être...



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