Spoons speak of political Islam

The photo above is of a cutlery tray at an ordinary food court. Those of us familiar with Singapore’s food courts will be able to read significance into the fact that there are two kinds of spoons mixed together. Spoons and forks with flowery handles are usually reserved for halal use; those with plain handles are non-halal. They are supposed to be kept apart and mixing them together even after washing is seen as causing contamination.

So what was going on in this food court? 

How cheap food is a national embarrassment

Recently, there have been a spate of news stories extolling cheap hawker meals. Each time I read them, I asked myself, “Why are we doing this? When we celebrate low prices, are we not whitewashing low purchasing power, and by extension, low wages and zero pensions?”

For my first example, let me point to the 6 Jan 2019 story in the Straits Times: Foodcourts in Singapore: Secret to Foodfare’s low prices. Ignore the fact that it was a kind of hagiography to parry criticism of NTUC Foodfare’s take-over of the Kopitiam chain of foodcourts. Embedded in the story was the message: We help Singaporeans because we sell cheap meals.

My second example is drawn from the Mothership website.  On 11 January, its story about a $1 nasi lemak stall sang praises about the woman who held her price steady for 32 years in the name of “customer satisfaction”.

Patches, grit, and the sorry state of things

There used to be benches on both sides. They were recently removed — most likely as part of SMRT’s “service improvement”, which is Orwellian-speak for “squeeze more people in”. The parts under the erstwhile benches are darker grey, but the outline of the benches isn’t of straight lines. Instead the wavy boundary between the darker and lighter grey is almost surely caused by abrasion from feet over the years.

Flapping wildly amidst the wreck

For the last few weeks, Singapore-based Keppel Offshore and Marine Ltd (“KOM”) has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. KOM and its wholly owned US subsidiary, Keppel Offshore & Marine USA Inc. have agreed to pay a combined total penalty of more than US$422 million (S$565 million) for making corrupt payoffs to officials in Brazil. Brazilian authorities will receive 50% of the penalty, while the US and Singapore authorities will receive 25% each.

This will hurt. KOM’s profit after tax for financial year ending 31 December 2016 was only S$326 million. Its business was already troubled as can be seen from the fact that its 2015 profit after tax was a much higher S$528 million.

Singapore Press Holdings bloodied and confused, part 2

I don’t think anyone has yet figured out what a viable business model for post-print journalism will look like. As Singapore Press Holdings’ (SPH) FY2017 results indicate, even while circulation is holding up, advertising revenue continues to be in freefall. The problem seems to be that print circulation brings in more advertising revenue than digital subscription. So even as digital makes up for print’s decline numbers-wise, revenue is reduced. This is true for other newspapers, such as the New York Times, as I mentioned in Part 1.

Singapore Press Holdings bloodied and confused, part 1

The deterioration of Singapore Press Holdings’ (SPH) fortunes has long been expected. As the monopoly publisher (now that Mediacorp’s Today has gone totally digital) of all Singapore’s print newspapers, not only is it suffering the same headwinds from digital that newspapers around the world have been experiencing, it has lost all sense of journalistic mission. Partly, this loss was due to demands of the Singapore government for government-friendly coverage, but partly too, its monopoly position — the flip side of its Faustian bargain — has eroded whatever competitive instincts it might once have had.

For these reasons, I am very doubtful that there is any blue sky ahead however many cost-cutting exercises SPH’s management performs. The problem isn’t cost; the problem is the brand and the impossibility of doing a proper journalistic job. Part 2 of this essay will expand on this.

Clean hands to eat poisonous vegetables

The toilet at this coffee shop is quite serviceable

I wonder how many people are as surprised as I was to read that a coffee shop had its licence suspended for a day over the absence of soap in its washroom. Gee, if that’s the case, I said to myself, hundreds of food establishements should be shut down. Dirty, broken and ill-provisioned toilets are everywhere in Singapore.

There was once a buffalo here

Making small provisions to enable people to upskill through bite-sized training courses will not be enough to cope with a world in which lifelong continuous learning and career switching has become necessary — I argued this in my previous post Spreading a bit of money to “position Singapore for the future”. But in the interest of length, I left untouched an even bigger question: What if, for all the retraining, adjustments and preparations we make, there simply isn’t enough work to be had? It’s a question that’s not only for Singapore.

Spreading a bit of money to “position Singapore for the future”

Singapore was mentioned favourably in a recent Economist magazine leader.

But the biggest change is to make adult learning routinely accessible to all. One way is for citizens to receive vouchers that they can use to pay for training. Singapore has such “individual learning accounts”; it has given money to everyone over 25 to spend on courses from 500 approved providers. So far each citizen has only a few hundred dollars, but it is early days.

— The Economist, 14 Jan 2017, Learning and earning: Equipping people to stay ahead of technological change

We will probably hear more about this in the coming weeks. The Committee on the Future Economy is supposed to have completed its work by the end of 2016, and anytime now, its report should be released. This committee was tasked to “keep the Singapore economy competitive by helping to position Singapore for the future, as well as identify areas of growth with regard to regional and global developments.”

Auxiliary thoughts about auxiliary police

A Certis Cisco auxiliary policeman and two neighbourhood vigilantes shooing away foreign workers

The news this week is that Certis Cisco — a fully-owned subsidiary of sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings — is hiring Taiwanese for its auxiliary police force. Here are four thoughts that I had, leading on from this key news point. They are: (1) What are the implications of hiring Taiwanese? (2) Why must they be graduates? (3) What are the powers of auxiliary police? (4) Another example of rentier economy?