Necessity vs luxury

Having all the time in the world may not be a good thing. It gives you time to think, normally useless thoughts. Only with certain goal in mind and a bit of dateline this time becomes useful.


For me, this time gave birth to thoughts of what the world could do with and without. Lets start with...

1. Razor - we need to shave. Good old shaver is good enough to complete the job. What we do not need is the electronic shaver. It consumes electricity, we can only use it when you have stubs and its heavy to carry when you travel. Solution: Back to basics - very sharp blades on a stick.


2. Bicycle - Look at the future of mankind: China (in terms of population). There will come a time public transport can do so much. But in order for this to work, there's a wider infrastructure revamp as well as superbly strong policital will that is needed for this to be implemented. Moving near where you work has a strong impact on what mode of transport you will take. This brings us to the 3rd necessity:

3. Housing- housing prices should be regulated as such its viable for people to move nearer to where they work. What I don't get is Bukit Timah area. All the 'best' schools are relocated there as such the price of houses there skyrocketed. I agree there should be 'private' segments of houses for people who could afford it, but public housing skyrocketing? That's not very public anymore is it?

4. Ok, topic getting too heavy. I'm getting back to the little things in life. School - I have never and will never comprehend the fact that there's not enough place for kids to study. What the heck? Forget building mega structures, longest bridges, underground tunnels, tallest buildings etc - just build me schools and the supporting infrastructures and develop manpower for it (they're called teachers that actually teach).

5. Abolish NS or make it optional - How about that? I sense some people are unhappy about having to serve NS while the others do not. To me, I think either is fine. Reason being those who served get slightly higher pay in most companies (lets call it hardship allowance) for the rest of their life after serving 2 years of NS. So if he has 30 years of productive life in the workforce and his hardship allowance is $200, he'd be earning extra $72,000. But if you still think its unfair, then just abolish it.. (can someone enlighten me why this is not possible?).

6. Make Singapore attractive for foreigners but don't ruin it by drawing so much line between the citizens and non-PRs. I personally think Singapore is wonderful place to stay. However I can't say the same in future. People are pushing so that citizens get more privilages. And I totally agree they should. But things like depriving the PRs from high quality of education just doesn't make sense. The recent enrolment restrictions into primary 1 is just the beginning. What happens to the 2nd generation PRs? They will be deprived of choice of school and then still have to serve NS. The inequality between the citizens and PRs was never such a big issue until recently. Few years ago, the influx of foreign workers increased due to bullish economy. At the same time, housing prices went up. This was attributed to the influx of PRs. I doubt that PRs which reportedly are less than 10% of HDB buyers could push the HDB price up by so much?! Come to think of it, if 10% could control the market price, then something must be wrong with the price monitoring system. Using this as one of the factors, ministers start putting in place measures to differenciate citizens and PRs which in my opinion is totally unrelated (school fee hikes, medical fee hikes, and next up housing restrictions?). My general opinion is this - Singapore wants to increase its population and thus the measures mentioned above. Those measures hopefully would encourage PRs to convert to citizenship. What about free will? I think some might convert but what would be the repercussions? Would outsider still consider Singapore as a wonderful place or would it create a new dissent generation of foreign talent?


It started off with a shaving exercise in the morning. I guess I still enjoy the basic things in life.