"Singapore to name orchid after Burmese junta leader"

You just can't make this stuff up.

See here too if you like your news local.

And if it's lost on anyone why we shouldn't be bestowing the privilege of orchid-naming on a much reviled dictator, despite him being a visiting dignitary and it being tradition, imagine how slighted every other dignitary who had an orchid named after them would feel now that they have something in common with Thein Sein. I don't know about you, but if I were Princess Diana, I would be turning in my grave right about now.

And if I were working at Nparks, particularly the person presenting the orchid to said dictator, it would be a sad sad day indeed.

Aside, now that the news of Thein Sein's visit is starting to get widely noted in the non-mainstream media, I wonder whether our local media will start to at least acknowledge the state visit by Thein Sein to Singapore, just to put their own spin on it. It should happen tomorrow or in the next few days, if the 2-day hypothesis holds. 

And so it begins...

The race for competitive devaluation is just beginning. Not that the US dollar is such a paragon of virtue. Despite its "strength", the US dollar is better described as the least bad of all currencies, excepting perhaps a certain shiny yellow metal (which does NOT construe a recommendation on my part in any way). 

Competitive devaluation could be a precursor for what every government around the world is exhorting everyone else not to do: protectionism.

Really? If paying down debt is also called savings, then I contend that explicit policies designed to encourage exports is also known as ... protectionism.

And the next thing to happen after protectionism is a global slowdown in trade, not that that isn't happening already.

For countries dependent on world trade, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Stay tuned.

Recession Fatigue

If you're experiencing "recession fatigue", as in you're sick of all the bad news in the economy, stock market, job market, real estate market, you had better sit tight. Things aren't going to return to 'normal' anytime soon.

This is rapidly shaping up to the worst recession in a generation and will probably influence the zeitgeist for the coming decade ahead.

The financial crisis is feeding off the economic crisis and is in turn fueling the economic crisis through one giant positive feedback loop. And embedded in this giant feedback loop are hundreds of other little vortices that are like tiny positive feedback loops acting in concert.

And we thought the big bank bailouts were the end of it. Heck, no. For the Singaporeans who care about such things, you can safely assume that our sovereign wealth fund investments in Citigroup are essentially worth zero already; Citigroup the global entity is effectively insolvent. That's in spite of the spin that we're paring losses. Further dilution of common equity through "preprivatization" or at the very least, more capital injections by the US government, is almost certain for sure.

And Singapore's exports driven growth model works just as well on the downside as it does on the upside. The problem is, we were so successful at it that every other Asian country jumped onto the exporting bandwagon, independently or not. It's now a really crowded ride. 

How are the economic numbers going to turn out in the near future of the next one or two years? If you live in the USA, you want to read this.

For Singapore, I'll take a wild stab at guessing the numbers. And the operative word here is guessing.

5% contraction in GDP and unemployment in the high single digits (~9%).

"Japan’s Crisis of the Mind"

From The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor:
By MASARU TAMAMOTO
Published: March 1, 2009 
Yokohama, Japan

RECENT events mark Japan’s return to the world’s stage, or at least so it seems. Tokyo was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inaugural overseas destination. Last week, Prime Minister Taro Aso was the first foreign leader to visit the Obama White House. All this suggests that Washington sees Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, as a powerful nation. If only we saw ourselves the same way.

The truth is, Japan is a mess. Mr. Aso’s approval rate recently hit 11 percent, and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party is in open disarray. His predecessor barely lasted a year. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan just offers more of the same. This is largely because we have become a nation of bureaucrats. What passes for national policy is the sum of various ministerial interests, often conflicting or redundant, with jealously guarded turfs and budgets. 

There can be no justification for all those mostly unused airports. Or for roads that lead nowhere. Or for the finance minister who appeared to be drunk at the Group of 7 meeting this month in Rome. Our problem is so deep that it sometimes seems that no political party can tame the bureaucracy and put in place a coherent national agenda.

But what most people don’t recognize is that our crisis is not political, but psychological. After our aggression — and subsequent defeat — in World War II, safety and predictability became society’s goals. Bureaucrats rose to control the details of everyday life. We became a nation with lifetime employment, a corporate system based on stable cross-holdings of shares, and a large middle-class population in which people are equal and alike. 

Conservative pundits here like to speak of this equality and sameness as being cornerstones of “Japanese” tradition. Nonsense. Throughout much of its history, Japan has had social stratification and great inequality of wealth and privilege. The “egalitarian” Japan was a creature of the 1970s, with its progressive taxation, redistribution of wealth, subsidies and the dampening of competition through regulation. This all seemed to work just fine until our asset-price bubble popped in the 1990s. Today, the hemmed-in Japanese seem satisfied with the knowledge that everyone around them is equally unhappy.

Since the middle of the 19th century, our economic success has relied on the availability of outside models from which to choose. Our model for social security took inspiration from Bismarck’s Germany, state planning from the Soviet Union, public works from the Tennessee Valley Authority, automobile assembly and manufacturing from Ford. Much of Japanese innovation has involved perfecting what others have created. Sony is famous for its Walkman, but it didn’t invent the tape recorder. Japan’s rise to economic greatness was basically a game of catch-up with the advanced West.

So what happened once we caught up? Over the past two decades, the answer has largely been paralysis. Japan’s ability to imitate outside models was mistaken for progress. But if progress is defined by pursuing a vision of a desirable future, then the Japanese never progressed. What we had was a concept of order and placement, which is essentially stasis.

In the West, on the other hand, the idea of progress rests on establishing individual autonomy and liberty. In Japan, bureaucratic rule offered security and predictability — in exchange for personal freedom. The problem is that our current political leaders can’t keep their side of the bargain. Employment security can no longer be guaranteed. The national pension and health plans seem to be insolvent in the long run. People feel both insecure and unfree.

Signs of despair are everywhere. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among rich countries. There may be as many as one million “hikikomori,” from teenagers to those in their 40s, who shut themselves in their rooms for years on end. Then there are all those “parasite singles” — or unmarried adults living with their parents. But by far our most serious problem is a declining and aging population. Given present trends, total population will likely decline from around 130 million to under 90 million in 50 years or so. By that same time, 40 percent of Japanese could be over 65.

If we want to survive as a nation, we must shed our deeply rooted resistance to immigration. Contrary to widespread prejudices in favor of keeping Japan “pure,” we desperately need to dilute our blood. Our aging nation will need millions of university-educated middle-class immigrants with high productivity, people who will put down roots and raise families, whose pride and success will be the affirmation of new Japanese values. 

Japan desperately needs change, and this will require risk. Risk-taking is not common among the bureaucratically controlled. You won’t find many signs on Japanese beaches saying, “Swim at your own risk. No lifeguard on duty.” If that sign were to appear, many Japanese would likely ask the authorities to tell them if it is safe to swim. This same risk aversion translates into protectionism and insularity. The ministry of agriculture, for example, wants to increase self-sufficiency in food. There is not nearly enough critical thinking and dissent in the Japanese news media. 

Still, the idea that the Japanese are afraid of risk has no basis in history, for better or for worse. Remember Pearl Harbor? In fact, Japan’s passiveness today is in large measure a calculated and reasonable reaction to its behavior during the Second World War. But today, this emphasis on safety and security is long past its sell-by date.

We have run out of outside models to imitate. We must start from scratch, embracing an idea of progress that is based on innovation, ambition and dynamism. Doing so will take risk — and extraordinary leadership. But the alternative is to continue stumbling down a path of decline.

Masaru Tamamoto is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.

The art of the subtle insult

This is a follow-on from a previous rant post. You can go back and read it to add color to this post, but I wouldn't recommend it. I re-read what I wrote and even I found it too rambling. But I digress.

Anyways, the abbreviated background to this post is that I was, and still am, quite miffed at someone I had to deal with in the course of work. Not a co-worker btw. Unfortunately for me, I still have to continue interacting with this odiousoid on a continuing basis.

Which brings us to today's post. How do you react when you get an email containing an important attachment which had to be forwarded to you by your boss because the sender, this irritant, "forgot" your name despite just having the corresponding discussion the previous afternoon? And it says so right there in the email, this questionable claim of "not [being] sure of his [my] full name" and asking my boss to resend the mail.

Did I mention that this is the third meeting between us? Or that there have been countless emails between our two offices prior to this meeting? You know, the kind with thousands of names on the CC list (including mine) and it being a simple matter of plucking the relevant email address from the CC field. 

Oh, and there was one person (my co-worker) who was there meeting the email sender for the very first time too. Said sender may have had Sudden Onset Alzheimer's when recalling my name, but had no problems remembering my co-worker's name though.

Charming.

I sooo need to master the art of the subtle insult asap. Something obvious enough to grate, but subtle enough not to be called on it. If nothing else, I'll get some moral satisfaction out of it. Perhaps this is a heaven-sent opportunity for me to hone those valuable office skills that all those fluffy soft skill courses always neglect to teach. 

So THAT"S why it's 12%!

OK, despite being a little too fond of thinking of myself as being more astute than the average person, I have to admit that it didn't occur to me initially why the Jobs Credit Scheme was set at 12%. I wondered why that particular number was picked, thinking it seemed arbitrary, but now I know why.

There was a local news report on "phantom workers" a few days ago. The transcript is available here.

Since the CPF employer contribution rate is set at 13% of an employee's salary, it's immediately obvious why the Jobs Credit Scheme cannot credit more than 13%. Otherwise, companies could use phantom workers to make money off the spread between the CPF employer contribution rate and the Jobs Credit rate. Ergo, the Jobs Credit rate is set just shy of 13%, i.e. 12%.

It just goes to show that the average coffeeshop owner has more business acumen in gaming the system than me, the postgraduate trained engineer. Sighz.

"Urban Composting: A New Can of Worms"

From The New York Times
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: February 18, 2009 

ON a recent Saturday afternoon, Stephanie Stern and her husband poured 1,000 wriggling red worms from a brown bag into a plastic bin outside their bathroom, looked down and hoped for the best. 

If things went well, the worms, already burrowing into their bed of shredded newspapers, would soon be eating three pounds of food scraps a week, reducing the couple’s trash and producing fertilizer for their plants.

If not, the bin would stink up their one-bedroom apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and attract clouds of fruit flies.

“I’m a little nervous because I’ve heard the stories,” said Ms. Stern, 32, a museum educator. 

Composting in New York City is not for the faint of heart. It requires commitment, space and sharing tight quarters with rotting matter and two-inch-long wiggler worms that look like pulsing vermicelli.

But an increasing number of New Yorkers have been taking up the challenge, turning their fruit skins and eggshells into nutritious crumbly soil in an effort they regard as the natural next step to recycling paper, bottles and cans. Food accounts for about 13 percent of the nation’s trash — it is the third largest component after paper and yard trimmings — and about 16 percent of New York’s. 

“There’s a growing awareness of its value,” said Elizabeth Royte, the author of “Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.” “We had a recycling revolution, now we need a composting revolution.”

Nationwide surveys by BioCycle, a monthly magazine that advocates the recycling of organic waste, have found that large-scale food composting projects among municipalities, colleges and farms nearly doubled between 2000 and 2007, to 267 from 138. Individual efforts are harder to measure, but appear to be on the rise, particularly in areas like New York City, where municipal programs are rare or nonexistent. Although some cities, like San Francisco and Seattle, offer residents regular curbside collection of food waste, large-scale composting presents challenges that may make it hard to catch on, waste-management experts say. The City of New York, which runs two compost facilities for backyard waste, has no similar program for food. 

That leaves food-waste composting up to community programs and gardens that accept donations of food scraps, and to people like Ms. Stern and her husband, Chris De Pasquale, 34. 

Ms. Stern had plenty of company, a few hours before the couple welcomed their 1,000 new roommates, at a workshop run by the Lower East Side Ecology Center at a library in the West Village, where a capacity crowd of about 70 people listened raptly to descriptions of how to set up and feed a “worm condo.” 

The workshop covered the indoor composting method known as vermicomposting, in which worms are enlisted to speed up the decomposition of organic material, eating through scraps of it and excreting the “castings” that make up compost. (There are also commercial composters like the NatureMill, shown in the article below.) The “condo” where this should take place is a 16 1/2-inch-wide, one-foot-tall bin with air holes in which shredded newspaper sits atop green trash like the ends of carrots. Despite the enthusiasm of the audience, particularly the children, as containers of compost and worms were passed around, some of its members seemed to have misgivings. “Will the compost bin attract roaches?” one asked. (Not if you don’t let the covered bin get smelly, he was told.) “What happens when you go on vacation?” (The bin can stay unattended for up to three weeks.)

A few were trying again after unhappy first experiences.

“Everything got disgusting in there,” said Rachel Franz, 25, who tried composting in Ithaca, N.Y., in 2006, following instructions from friends. “The worms started dying, and it got really moldy,” she said. “When I opened it, the worms were trying to escape.”

If the worms want out, said Carey Pulverman, the workshop’s instructor and the project manager at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, “something is wrong.”

Happy worms eat about half their body weight in a day, and the compost is ready for harvesting in about four and half months, Ms. Pulverman said.

But if the paper is too wet, she continued, seepage or smell ensues. Certain food and organic matter is bad for indoor bins because it smells while decomposing (meat and dairy), attracts mold (bread) or may introduce insects to the bin (dry leaves).

None of this deterred Ms. Franz, the failed composter, who this time around planned to set up her bin under the kitchen sink of her father’s three-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, where she lives part of the time. Her father, she said, was resisting.

“He thinks it’s going to be a lot of work for him,” said Ms. Franz, who studied environmental science and is currently looking for work.

Experienced composters said that saving food scraps soon becomes part of a daily routine, and that the payoff is worth the extra work. 

“To be actually able to reuse your food is amazing,” said Ben Stein, 30, a computer programmer who, along with his wife, Arin Kramer, 29, a nurse practitioner, composted for six years in their apartment on the Lower East Side before they moved to a brownstone in Brooklyn last year.

In Manhattan, they kept the bin under the bed, which Mr. Stein said led friends to think, “it’s disgusting, and you’re absolutely crazy.” In Boerum Hill, they can compost in their backyard (where microbial activity and decomposition slow down or stop in the winter, but pick up in the spring). 

One friend recently surprised the couple by taking them up on their offer to compost his “veggie waste” for him.

“He delivered a bag of cuttings and scraps that took up half his freezer,” Mr. Stein said.

Is all this effort doing the planet good?

Composting does not have as big an environmental effect as recycling, Environmental Protection Agency figures show: recycling one ton of mixed paper is four times as effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as producing the same amount of compost. 

But keeping food discards out of landfills does more than twice the good of keeping mixed paper out, E.P.A. officials said, because decomposing food that is buried and cut off from air releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at higher rates than paper. (The ventilation in composting prevents methane creation.) 

The real environmental benefits, of course, come when composting is done on a large scale. Robert Lange, the recycling director at New York’s Department of Sanitation, said the city investigated this route a few years ago, testing food scrap collection in some neighborhoods but finding it a tougher sell than recycling.

“Most people will not store food waste in their apartment,” Mr. Lange said, adding that many worried about odors and vermin.

Still, groups that operate food scrap collection services say they have seen a marked jump in participation over the last year. The Lower East Side Ecology Center, which collects scraps at two Manhattan locations and runs its own food composting facility at East River Park, said that Saturday drop-offs to its Union Square Greenmarket location have nearly doubled, to almost 500 gallons.

But reducing the amount of trash produced in the first place should be the highest priority, experts say. And some note people would also do better to consider what they eat and to switch away from foods like beef, the production of which is associated with high emissions of carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas. 

Still, Mr. De Pasquale and Ms. Stern — who also get renewable power from ConEdison Solutions, a subsidiary of Con Edison that provides wind energy — are convinced they are making a difference with their at-home composting.

And after more than three weeks, the couple’s worms seemed to be doing well in their dark corner near the bathroom. So far there have been no escapes and only a slight smell that Ms. Stern said she fixed with some dry newspaper. 

They plan to use the compost for their house plants and share any leftovers.

“I think it’d be a great holiday gift,” Ms. Stern said. 

Her husband agreed. “We can send it out to my parents in California.”