Quick thoughts on the Sunday Times, 3 October 2010

I haven’t had much time or inclination to write on substantive topics lately, but I’ve still had some thoughts. Just not enough to write lengthy posts on.

I’m starting a new tag, “quick thoughts”, to denote short posts that deal with random topics. Today’s quick thoughts are responses to the Sunday Times, 3 October 2010.

“Inflation Up: How to make your money work harder” – Invest, Page 30

No mention by Lorna Tan on the hardest inflation hedge of all: gold. Disclosure: I’ve been heavily invested in the precious metals for the past 2 plus years or so. That gold is still not mentioned in the mainstream media is great news; it means it hasn’t entered bubble territory, yet.

As always, I make no claims to offering investment advice. I do not share the gains or losses of readers, so make your own investment decisions. If you are at all interested in precious metals, please do your own research.

Personally, I’m invested in gold and silver exchange-traded funds, BUT not GLD or SLV. There have been some allegations or suspicions of fraudulent dealing by both. My holdings are in ZKB and ZSIL, both managed by the Zurich Cantonal Bank. Why? You’ll have to do your own research to figure out why. One thing to note: these two exchange traded funds are traded only on the Swiss Exchange, and the last I checked, only one broker in Singapore offers access to the Swiss Exchange, and that’s Saxo Capital Markets.

“Rail-life Stories” – lifestyle, Page 8

The closure of Tanjong Pagar railway station and its relocation to Woodlands is understandable. Sad, but understandable. It’s not just the land that the station sits on is prime and can be redeveloped, but also all the land that the railway currently sits on.

Still, it would be nice if we had the equivalent of a Grand Central Station or Union Station in downtown Singapore. I love the romantic look and feel of grand railway stations, and I have fond memories of Union Station. As a student at Hopkins, I used to take the train between Baltimore and DC when staying in Baltimore got too boring. Also, air tickets from Dulles International Airport were sometimes substantially cheaper compared to tickets from BWI airport.

High-speed rail between downtown Singapore and downtown Kuala Lumpur would lead to all sorts of positive synergistic effects.

“Screen off the sun” – Pulse, Page 10

I’m not a fan of sunscreen. I apply it to prevent sunburn, not out of a desire to be fair (heck, I’m a guy) or prevent skin cancer.

Unknown to many, there is a sunscreen controversy brewing out there. In a nutshell, there is some evidence to suggest that sunscreen, ironically enough, may increase the risk of malignant melanoma.

Personally, I’m more concerned with vitamin D deficiency. More and more studies have found vitamin D to be implicated in many crucial metabolic processes, and it's unclear if each of us is really getting the amount we ought to be getting. What compounds matters is that if we avoid sun exposure, there really aren’t that many dietary sources of the vitamin, especially if you don’t fancy dairy products.

Coldwater fish oil is one non-dairy source. The problem is that to purge fish oil of contaminants like PCBs, most reputable fish oil supplements, which are touted for their Omega acid content, are probably devoid of vitamin D, thanks to extensive purification processes.

So far, I haven’t found a really satisfactory solution. If you take fish oil, there are good fish oil products out there, like Carlson’s fish oil, which unfortunately isn’t available in Singapore, but still, it won’t provide you with Vitamin D. Personally, I just take Michael Pollan’s advice to eat food. So here’s to an extra serving of saba and shishamo whenever I eat Japanese.

Oh and contrary to Mary Schmich's advice, I'm laying off the sunscreen unless absolutely necessary.

Blogging Break

I've been busy, and will continue to be busy for the next few weeks, so no blogging for the next few weeks.

Just got back from Bali over the Hari Raya weekend for a short paragliding holiday. I managed to get two flights in, which was helpful in exorcising the previous bad experience I had in Bali. 

I met some wonderful people on my trip and made new friends, both pilots and non-pilots alike, so it was an enjoyable trip.

But now with the holiday over, work looms, and this week, I'll be moving house as well, so there's lots to do and no time to bitch about read local news, much less blog about it.

Updates will come later when the time and opportunity to write present themselves again.

Implications of No Retirement Age

Frontpage article on the Straits Times today - MM Lee: If a man is fit, let him carry on working.

The issue of raising, or even doing away altogether with the retirement age, has been bandied about for quite a while now. Let's begin with a quote from MM Lee, his answer to the last question of the interview the Straits Times did with him (of which a transcript can be found in the Straits Times): 

Q: Some Singaporeans disagree with your view that they should not retire but keep on working. They argue that the end of life is a happy retirement, not more work.

A: Those who want to engage in new pursuits, and develop new interests which they could not do so because of work, can do so. They will have no income and may run out of their savings and CPF monies earlier.

The most important thing, something that must always be kept uppermost in mind, is that the government does not want to own the "retirement problem". More to the point, it does not want citizens, for lack of their own funds, becoming destitute, so that the government is placed in the uncomfortable position of either having to loosen the purse-strings, or risk appearing heartless and stingy (and self-aggrandizing, with the massive ministerial pay packets it's famous for).

[Here, of course, we ignore the inconvenient fact that cabinet ministers in Singapore are one of the few groups of civil servants still eligible for pensions.] 

Every other argument in favor of raising or abolishing the retirement age, including the rapidly ageing workforce, is a red herring. We've already imported foreign workers by the planeload. And the government has no qualms in importing more. As many as are needed to keep growth high. The recent speeches are just platitudes to placate the masses.

Once you comprehend the motivation behind why MM Lee desires to abolish the retirement age, things become much clearer.

Capable people whose skills are in demand, no matter what their age, are likely to be able to find employment no matter what their age. MM Lee falls into this category (although some would argue that he's manufactured his own need, but I digress). Such people are also likely to have sufficient financial resources to retire as and when they wish.

The real problem is those who can't afford to retire, and must continue working until the day they die to make ends meet. If they're unemployable beyond a certain age, due to some pesky thing called a retirement age, where is the money going to come from to feed and clothe these people? Heaven forbid that it be government.

Please note: In this post, I do not intend to make a stand for or against abolishing the retirement age. I am merely exploring motivations and implications. It just so happens that in exploring motivations, it is difficult not to arrive at the conclusion that the government is...how shall we call it, mercenary.

Somebody needs to pay for the retirement of citizens who cannot afford to not work even in their twilight years. Correction. Let me rephrase that. Somebody needs to finance the decommissioning costs of labor inputs who have outlived their productive life span, are passing into senescence, and who happen to have the statutory status of "citizen" on this island called "Singapore, (Inc.)".

There, that sounds suitably technocratic.

And there is a simple solution for that. Abolish retirement. Make people pay their own way from cradle to grave. And their employers too.

But realistically speaking, employers face massive problems with no retirement age, as amply covered in the Straits Time today. Those problems are serious and real. And besides, foreign direct investment, business and enterprise, these are the lifeblood of the Singapore economy. When push comes to shove, it is far easier to shortchange citizens than businesses here in Singapore. That's why corporate taxes were cut while GST was raised simultaneously in 2007.

Just two days after my last post, I have new predictions to add to my list. What else will the PAP do after being returned to power in the next elections?

1. Further reduce or even eliminate employers' contribution to CPF for workers after the age of 62. 

2. Raise the age at which CPF can be withdrawn for retirement purposes (currently 55).

3. Other tweaks to the CPF scheme, such as raising the minimum sum, or requiring a larger amount to be set aside in Medisave. Perhaps more unusual changes, like permitting Medisave to be used for occupational therapy. Or an income-withdrawal matching scheme - you can only take out of CPF an amount that is proportionate to income you earn after 62.

4. The laws requiring employers to retain employees after 62 will certainly be passed at some point, and they will be enforced. But the terms under which employers extend employment to the elderly are likely to be relaxed and weighted in favor of employers. Employers may be free to offer a starvation minimum wage, few benefits or temporary contracts. It's not like the people who need the work are in a position to bargain. I mean, what are they going to do, petition the government for more equitable terms?

Aside from these predictions, there are other implications of abolishing the retirement age.

1. The civil service is going to lead the way. On paper, retaining staff with years of expertise sounds great. So does abolishing seniority-based wage structures. Admittedly, I have interacted with only a few senior civil servants in a personal capacity. But those few I have met all seem to have a very hard time relaxing their grip. It's almost a pathological condition. Having a very large group of people, all with considerable egos, jockeying for position in what already seems like a highly adversarial environment, seems like a hazardous position for bystanders. Like ordinary Singaporeans. 

In my job, I've frequently been placed in the ludicrous position of helping to devise 5-year "roadmaps" every 2 years. Every person of "note" desires to put their personal stamp on their new appointment. Personal fiefdoms and what I like to call "turf issues" are remarkably common. If KPIs for civil servants and growth at all costs got us to where we are today, I hesitate to imagine what the future will hold when we have a civil service even more stuffed with highly driven, opinionated and competitive Type A's. Add crotchety, curmudgeon-y, and every other bad elderly cliche to the list.

2. With employers being compelled to retain older people, that means less labor flexibility, which, oddly enough, is sharply at odds with the national labor philosophy. That could ricochet all the way down through the generations. The Straits Times article mentioned Japan. Could we develop a freeter underclass as well?

3. Lots of people won't think too much now about the abolition of the retirement age. They're either too young, or think that they will be financially secure enough to afford voluntary retirement anyway, years from now, so the point is moot.

I am not even 30, but my opinion is different. The economy now is as good as it gets. Fiscal stimulus in developed countries can only go so far, and China's economy is a house built on sand. Normal people are now stretched to afford housing or the lifestyle they aspire to even in such a benign environment, having to take on massive amounts of debt (at currently low interest rates). What happens when all those finely laid plans are turned to dust? Things may appear far less sanguine years into the future.

Some thoughts on the National Day Rally Speech

I didn't watch the National Day Rally speech on TV. Well, actually, I don't watch local TV, period. Local TV infuriates me, especially when it's a local politician talking-head.

But I skimmed through the details in the paper the next day. Mostly to find out what the "giveaways" were. I put giveaways in quotes as they're not freebies, not really.

As an NSman, I'm eligible for the $9000 CPF credit. Well, not exactly, I'm eligible for only a fraction of it actually. Figures. It's not what I've done for you yesterday that matters; it's what I can do for you today or tomorrow that matters. Very investment banking-like, it's yet another characteristic of the PAP government that hews close to the mentality of bankers. The irony, of course, is that the PAP government never fails to remind us of what it has done for us in the past, and that Singaporeans should be grateful. Well, I think I'll take a leaf from the PAP politician's book from here on. In fact, I've subscribed to that school of thought for quite some time now.

What can you do for me TODAY, PAP, that should make me want to put you back in office? Platitudes can be dispensed with. Show me the money. Otherwise, if I can't get an equitable slice of the pie, I would much rather the whole pie fly out the window. Or end up creaming your face. Think Ultimatum Game.

It's hardly a secret that elections are coming. The whole targeted NS credit is just another election sweetener - targeting the most disenchanted and reactionary segment of the population (the male youth) that has the least to lose and has the shallowest roots (no HDB loan, no career as yet, and no desire to settle down, especially in Singapore, in the near term). The NS credit is even clever in a way, with tiered rewards corresponding to how settled in and unlikely to rock the boat a citizen is.

What's interesting to think about, of course, is what's going to happen AFTER the upcoming elections. The PAP government giveth with one hand, but it has always taketh with another hand also. Long has the PAP government counted on Singaporeans having a memory a little shorter than an election cycle. 

Let's have a thought experiment. A prediction game if you will. What do I think the PAP will "take away" after it has been returned to power?

1. GST. The GST offsets from the latest hike have just expired in 2010. That means that GST is fair game again for a hike. Perhaps not too likely, given the hue and cry the last time, but hey, when has unpopularity ever been a reason to stop the government from doing something it badly wants to do? YOG is the most recent example of that.

2. Hospital charges. The last big hike was perhaps in 2008. With the opening of the new Khoo Teck Puat hospital, the government can (honestly!) claim that they've been DOING SOMETHING. That sounds like a fine justification for an increase in charges, innit?

3. Local transportation. Not public transport; the distance-based thingy was a pet project that had only just been recently completed. Nope. If local transportation's going to get more expensive, it's going to be for drivers. No wait, it's not going to be more expensive, at least for [insert arbitrary figure greater than 50% here] of drivers. That's why it's full steam ahead for satellite-based ERP.

4. Ministerial salary increases. Hey, with the economy steaming ahead at double digit percentages, never mind the transient nature of globally-coordinated fiscal stimuli carried out through MORE sovereign debt and money-printing quantitative easing,  there's no better time to pay our ministers even more, especially since they may need to take a pay cut later on when the sugar high of fiscal stimulus inevitably wears off. Kind of like retailers marking up merchandise and then discounting it again.

5. The press has gone to town with those wretched students who bilk their parents out of their CPF money for tertiary education. You know it's serious when they devote an editorial in the Straits Times to it. And the government has never liked it when there's even a remote risk of people not being able to afford their own retirement. Expect curbs in the future on usage of CPF money for tertiary education.

I might add to this list in the future. And I will certainly reproduce this list from time to time if and when any of the predictions materialize.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

I've been spending a not inconsiderable amount of time on mturk.com lately.

I had heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk quite a while back, but had never really bothered to check it out until recently. Basically, mturk allows humans to either request or work on what are known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for micropayments. Read more here. If you're based in the USA or India, you can actually cash out your earnings. For everyone else, your earnings get deposited into an account with Amazon which you can then use to purchase items on Amazon.

It's generally difficult to make serious money (i.e. more than minimum wage) on mturk, although it's not unheard of. For Requestors, who may range from corporations to graduate students, the quality of work that you can get back from Workers on mturk is also of uncertain quality. But mturk is still a useful resource; that's why it's been around for a while.

I've been working on and off on mturk for the past two weeks or so as a personal project and experiment, and while I never really got to the point of making serious money, it was substantial enough to score me a chunk of change. I made about USD100 over about 10 to 15 hours of work spread over two weeks...and my first shipment of Amazon swag courtesy of mturk is en route to Singapore as we speak via vpost. This is probably an unsustainable figure though, as I scored some high-paying HITs that don't come by too often (One paid me $15 for a 750 word article I cranked out in a little over an hour). 

I think I could probably sustainably make about $10 to $20 a week turking. That may not seem like a lot, but it does add up. More importantly, it doesn't feel like work. I complete HITs while surfing on the Internet, waiting for videos on Youtube to load, or just because doing HITs is fun. For instance, I've been completing a set of audio transcriptions of interviews done for a documentary on Polaroid, and it's been interesting hearing artists and photographers talk about why they still use Polaroid despite the prevalence of digital photography.

I've done transcriptions of classroom lectures by Mormons (deathly boring, and for some reason, mturk is stuffed with them), interviews with venture capitalists, interviews with an American manager of an auto components plant in Mexico who talks about offshoring of the auto industry (obviously part of a research study or dissertation), and an interview with the maker of the just released video game Mafia II (probably part of an entertainment channel that wanted a transcription). 

So I'm a little picky with my HITs, but that's because I don't do it just for the money. Turking can be fun too.

If you ARE interested in making money on mturk, then you would probably want a strategy that maximizes profits and minimizes the time spent. Lots of strategies that you can google for out on the web. But personally, I'm just happy to make a few dollars each day doing something that's mildly enjoyable and not having to spend any cash at all the next time I order something from Amazon. 

The Pose Method

Perhaps it's because posts on my blog are linked from Singapore Daily that I have unconsiously written more from a socio-economic slant, although that wasn't the original intention with which I started this blog.

This blog was originally meant to serve as a repository of my thoughts as well as a communication tool, both with people I know personally (but often do not meet up with in person as often as I would like) and with people I don't know but might find interesting to converse with online.

In any case, it's been a while since I posted anything on running, which had been one primary subject for this blog. Running is, after all, something I spend about 10 hours on a week.

Today's post is on the Pose Method, a modified running form that is purported to improve performance.

Re-engineering one's form in any sport is never a simple or quick matter, particularly without coaching, so I had drastically reduced my mileage from the usual 40 - 60 kilometers per week (off-season) to a more moderate 25 kilometers per week in the last two months to experiment with the Pose Method. Of course, I took care not to sign up for any race this year, such as the Stanchart Marathon which I traditionally run at the end of the year, so there was no pressure to add mileage during the week.

There's a lot of information on the web on the Pose Method; it's just that most people haven't heard of it before. In fact, the creator of the Pose Method, Nicholas Romanov, first found widespread interest in the method not among runners, for which it had been originally developed for, but among the more hardcore open-minded triathlon community.

Very briefly, the Pose Method allegedly improves efficiency and performance while reducing the risk of injury, particularly chronic overuse injuries that typically plague runners. It does so by prescribing naturally falling forefoot landings, rapid ankle raising/pulling, and a forward lean that harnesses the force of gravity.

Does it work?

After two months of experimenting, I think it does. I'm running either faster, or at a comparable speed to what I was running before, but with noticeably less effort.

However, from my experience, the Pose Method is not without caveats.

The Pose Method requires the runner to run at a reasonably fast pace - an equivalent or better than four and a half minute per kilometer pace. That translates into a sub-eight minute per mile pace. If you can't run that fast, you're going to have problems with the forward lean part of the Pose Method.

Secondly, one of the virtues of the Pose Method is that it reduces the likelihood of injury to the joints, especially the knees, by prescribing forefoot landings. The impact of running, however, still needs to be absorbed somewhere, and in the case of the Pose Method, it's the calves and the Achilles tendons that do the job.

The first time I ran using a facsimile of the Pose Method, emphasising forefoot landings, I couldn't run for a week after. The Pose Method is murder on the calves for beginners, before the gastrocnemius and soleus have had time to adapt and remodel in response to the increased loading. Unfortunately, I found out about this only after beginning my training. Now, with increased practice though, I can comfortably run about 14 kilometers with the Pose Method.

Is the Pose Method right for you? Well, it depends on whether you can learn well using just books and videos, which is what I did. And if you're fine with the two caveats above. As I said, re-engineering form is never an easy endeavor, and you should never attempt it if you are currently training for a race or an event. Save it for the off-season instead.

[I have no way of proving it, but I suspect Straits Times journalists read blogs too, and more annoyingly, crib ideas from the blogosphere. It does seem an awful bit of coincidence that a post I had written several weeks back provided ideas for an article that ran just a few weeks later. It wasn't the first coincidental occurrence, but this was the most recent example. So this is just a placeholder here in case Jeanette Wang, resident runner and fitness editor at the Straits Times, or anyone else for that matter, decides to write something on the Pose Method and publish it in the local paper.] 

The YOG will be a success

It must be nice working for the government when you're in a position like Teo Ser Luck. Or Vivian Balakrishnan.

Ignoring that part of the reason why the YOG is being organized is to bolster your public profile just so you can stand for elections under the ruling party's banner in the near future, purely a coincidence I'm sure, the government will bend over backwards and pull out all the stops to make the event happen. Nay, not happen, make it a success even, a foregone conclusion.

Budget overrun? No problem. Triple the amount of money available, and doubtless there's more if needed. Concerned with transportation hiccups? Request that the LTA mandate a YOG-only lane that motorists must give way to, on pain of a fine. Put in a note to remind Ms. Saw from SMRT to run more trains, something a groundswell of grousing and bitching from the public failed to do. Stacks of tickets left unsold? Get MOE to conscript students and SAF commanders to force NSFs to attend the various events. Apathetic public? Enlist the "nation-building" press to print favorable stories and put the best possible spin on things. Whatever. Call in all the favors you need. The time and inconvenience to thousands of students, NSFs and motorists is...inconsequential when it comes to trading favors between powers that have a mutual understanding of how things really work here on the Island. I think they call it networking in the public service, and those job rotations are meant to foster this sort of thing.

As for inconveniencing the great unwashed, people are resources and factor inputs after all; they're meant to be used to achieve a desired result. If you have to, justify it with a nebulous claim of supporting the Olympic spirit, or an appeal to nationalistic sentiments. Doesn't matter that it runs counter to the average experience that a Singaporean grows up with, that if you want something, you've got to pay for it (hey, we learnt from the best.) You want my time, my passion, pay for it. Money talks and bullshit walks.

If a project that I had to manage at work were to meet with massive budget overruns, failure to meet specified targets, or inability to obtain customer buy-in, I would be hauled up before the risk management committee, along with my boss, for an earful. My bonus would be negatively affected, and my career prospects probably shot.

No recourse to summon extraordinary resources from distant realms, like what the organizers for the YOG can do. And of course the YOG will be a success. The only KPI for its success, after all, is that it was held. Nobody should doubt that the Anointed Ones for the YOG will receive anything other than accolades for this event. After all, worst things have occurred on the watch of other luminaries and nothing untoward has ever happened to them.

I wish I had a teflon career. With millions of dollars in wages and benefits. Pity. Common mortals like me are so...encumbered...with accountability.