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Saturday, Sep 07, 2013 - 22:56 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

A's The Letter

In research, it's the waiting that gets to one.

Making the rounds this week is an insightful comic on the need for approval, if through social media communication and "likes", while growing more disconnected in real life. Personally, actively chasing acknowledgement, either in cyber or physical-space, is a bit of a dead-end, especially as I suspect that a large slice of action is down to reciprocity. Someone should really test this "liking-back" theory empirically with a dummy Facebook account.

Annoyingly, when The State's Times had to do a cutback, it chose to skimp on sense of humour of all things, reducing the weekday comics section from eight to two. "Readership for comics low?!" Who does their legendary surveys for them? Since they can't be so hard up as to be trying to save on the piddly syndication fees, I can only suppose that some new revenue manager who wants to make his mark is in charge, or they're figuring that it won't make a difference for their plunging readership figures in the long run anyway.


One more reason to turn away from print media


With The Time Before Chrome a fading memory, Google saw fit to release probably the biggest cosmetic update in years, as indicated by a tiny "a" by the menu button. That stands for Aura, but more importantly, represents a transition of the user interface rendering from the operating system to the browser itself.

One might shrug and ask whether this is a big deal - increasing developer control over the appearance of their product (webpages) has been the ongoing trend, and one can go back to the bad old days when one plonked down a textbox, and was completely at the mercy of the end-user's system as to how it was displayed. Too long? Don't like the bevel? Too bad.

But with this implementation, Google has rubbed in the power shift in the industry ever so subtly. Windows? Mac OS? Unix? Who cares? Once one goes online, which is increasingly the major attraction of having a computer, the environment and brand experience is instantly hijacked by the Big G, with some sources already hailing Chrome as the world's most popular browser. If their overall drive towards offering quality OS-independent applications through the web comes off, the likes of Microsoft could find themselves relegated to peddling what would be regarded as a low-level commodity. It's happened.

Apparently even Apple has decided that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so what if he's also my enemy, as the clusterbeep in the Middle East is once again shaping up to be. Perhaps everything would be so much cleaner if all the nations involved simply dropped their top political leader, bearing their favourite melee weapon, into an MMA cage and let them sort it out among themselves. Ordering a hit for social equity is so much more Mr. Ham's style.

Alternatively, some faction could unveil the secret of practical quantum computation or perfect the art of mind control, and dominate the rest of the world. That could work too. But with my luck, they still won't be able to read my DNA, despite being able to analyse hours-old chewing gum. And Teletext will be gone by the end of the month. Guess somebody will find time to emulate it on the Internet...

Then again, some will still riff about there never being anything new. Shame about the innovation culture, though - it seems an iron rule that once an organization gets big, it begins ceasing to be creative.


Hey, one out of three ain't too bad


I frankly didn't want to keep harping on "no change", but also couldn't let the latest scare sell on Singapore "becoming the slowest growing country in the world's fastest growing region" go just like that. Is the minister seriously proposing chasing the same 5-plus percent GDP growth rates that Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam etc will likely register?

Some perspective here:

Country/CityGDP per capita, US$ (~2011/12)
Qatar$86000-$104000
Luxembourg$80000-$92000
Macau$82000-$88000
Norway$55000-$65000
Abu Dhabi$64000
Washington$63000
Singapore*$61000
New York$57000
Brunei*$55000
Paris$54000
Hong Kong$52000
Switzerland$45000-$53000
Malaysia*$17000
Thailand*$10000
Indonesia*$5000
Philippines*$4500
Vietnam*$3500
Laos*$3000
Cambodia*$2500
Burma*$1500

[Sources: Wikipedia, Global Metro Monitor 2011]
[N.B. ASEAN countries marked with asterix]


All signs point towards us already within about the top five countries, or top ten metropolitan areas, by GDP per capita. Quite an achievement, certainly. The flip side is then that slower growth comes with the package, as is only to be expected - I can't imagine any self-respecting economist proposing that developed economies will, or can, grow as fast as developing ones, and from the numbers, most of ASEAN has a lot of room to advance, partly due to their size. In short, being the slowest-growing country in the region is more or less a given, by any conventional school of economic thought.

So why this specific warning? It's not as if we can realistically chase Laos or Cambodia if they attain 6-8% growth, right?

And then the real concern was revealed, when the support ratio dropping from six to two is again brought up - i.e., our policies were only ever designed to operate with an unnaturally large proportion of the populace being in the workforce. So the same old shill continues...



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