TR EMERITUS

Singapore opened its 5th and newest desalination plant on Jurong Island. Among other things, it was also reported that it is 5% more energy efficient. I like what I have read although I have some thoughts. Despite our fast aging population, our population is growing, courtesy of the government's immigration policies, hence, the demand for housing, competition for jobs and health care etc will always remain heighten, however, all those will play second fiddle to the demand for water and energy. The opening of Hyflux Tuas Spring started off very promising but it ended miserably due to a variety of reasons and among them, collapsed of the electricity prices. There are many valuable lessons that we can learn from the Hyflux's failure if only we bother. Desalination is a highly energy intensive operation and imported gas generated > 95% of our electricity. Singapore is in a very, very vulnerable position on water and energy and will be even more so going forward. Nuclear technology has made great strides over the years and whenever Nuclear is mentioned, safety issues have always come to the fore of people's psyche and it is totally understandable because just one accident whether it is resulted from some strong earthquakes that happen in nearby Indonesian islands, successful sabotage or successful terrorism etc could thoroughly wipe out our little red dot, however, given our extremely tight situation, I say never say never to nuclear energy usage. It maybe worth our while to objectively take a second look at it again in a technological elvoving environment. We can muster the best technologies that the world has to offer, both local and international nuclear top brains, scientists and relevant professionals to explore and study the possibility of having a small and highly regulated nuclear reactor to serve our desalination needs and more. Needless to say, all safety aspects and contingency requirements must exceed the most stringent international standards at all times etc. Outside Singapore, we are also likely to encounter our neighbours' objections. A strong government must be able to work through all that and secure our national interest. I doubt if we can ever have one with iron in them, the lhl administration or a new one under a new Prime Minister. I am sharing my thoughts and I invite feedback from all. Think   Simon Lim      Read More →

At least 75 percent of women in their first trimester who have received the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine have had a miscarriage, according to one fertility clinic. In the April 11 episode of “The Ben Armstrong Show,” the host played a clip in which Sen. Malcolm Roberts of Queensland, Australia, revealed findings by a local gynecology clinic about an increasing number of women having difficulty getting pregnant. According to Roberts, about 13 percent of women have miscarriages around the world. But the miscarriage rate increased to 50 percent with vaccinated women. With those vaccinated in the first trimester, the miscarriage rate rose to 75 percent. (Related: Healthy 39-year-old single mother dies four days after getting second dose of Moderna coronavirus vaccine.) “That is huge information that is being ignored,” said Ben Armstrong. Health authorities can’t seem to make up their minds The U.K. initially said that it was not safe for pregnant women to get the COVID-19 vaccine. However, by the end of April 2021, the Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunization updated its guidelines to say that COVID vaccines pose no specific safety concerns in relation to pregnancy. The BBC reported on this update with similar guides from a number of medical authorities who said that they should be careful with their dose. Explaining the reason behind the shift in guidance, the BBC cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study of over 90,000 pregnant women, saying that there had been no evidence that any vaccine can cause fertility problems. The CDC data form part of a broader study, which concluded that there are no obvious safety signals among pregnant women who received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. (Related: VAX ATTACKS: The new mRNA coronavirus vaccines will likely cause immune cells to attack placenta cells, causing female infertility, miscarriage or birth defects.) However, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency advised pregnant and breastfeeding women to avoid taking a COVID-19 vaccine due to the limited data regarding its effects. Additionally, the World Health Organization said in January 2021 that the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant women is not recommended. COVID-19 vaccines are neither safe nor effective However, there had been records of vaccine adverse events being dangerous. The Pfizer document data dump, for instance, showed that Pfizer knew that its COVID-19 vaccine was not safe and effective at all. It produces vaccine injuries and can even cause death. Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew that the vaccines cause heart problems for teenagers, yet gave it emergency approval for teens despite the age group not being vulnerable to the virus. A doctor also pointed out that in May 2021, the FDA had 35 new cases of myocarditis in teenagers, yet the hospital administered them with the vaccine with no mention of its harm to teenagers’ hearts. Pfizer itself paid the media to tell people that the vaccines were safe and effective despite knowing otherwise. However, when it started to want to force jabs on younger people, it did so despite admitting that they were not especially vulnerable to the virus. With healthy immune systems, most teenagers are likely to get mild colds and recover in two weeks thanks to their natural immunity. There has been no need for a vaccine. Yet, the company and the FDA still haven’t pulled back on the mandates. “Don’t ever tell someone to get something that is risky to their health, to protect them from something that’s not risky from their health. That’s unethical. It’s evil,” Armstrong said about the mandates.   Source: Vaccine Deaths        Read More →

I’ve never been one for the corporate office. Although freelancing was not the most lucrative in as much as I was unable to build without a steady income, I am far prouder of the things that I did as an independent contractor than when I was employed by a corporation. Whilst peers in the PR agency could boast of reaching certain positions in Western multinationals run out of New York and London, little me, a nobody with no great corporate experience from little Singapore was compared with a multinational PR agency (“You did more for us than….). I only swallowed getting properly employed in an insolvency firm when the then Evil Teen became a part of my life. My pride of being able to survive outside the Singapore norm (needing New York, London or the Government to tell me what to do) had to give way to the responsibilities of fatherhood and so I stayed in the “steady,” and “respectable” space of being a working “professional” in establishment Singapore. I actually worked more than office hours on a daily basis because it was the “normal” thing to do. Then came the pandemic and the lockdown in April 2020. Life in the lockdown took some adjustment, especially at the moments when retainer income wasn’t coming in. However, I started a simple walking routine and when I started moving more, the brain started to function. When I had to return to the office and resume a life of having to be in a certain location more than two hours at a time and had to look at files and store bits of paper, it finally dawned upon me that the “normal” life of an office job and being part of some self-made tribe of a profession is in fact not normal at all. The increasingly crowded bus ride into the office puzzles me. Why do people take such joy in going to places that go against what nature designed us to do? It is not natural to sit at a desk for eight hours a day looking at bits of paper containing information about things that happened a decade ago. People take pride in being chained to a desk. I hear of people bragging about how they were up looking files all night or how they are under so much stress that they can’t sleep or eat, I’m suddenly aware of why populations in the developed world aren’t growing – people are too busy masturbating over files in the office to have sex I shouldn’t knock masturbation – as Woody Allen says, “It’s sex with someone you love.” However, there comes a point when we’re so busy masturbating over our self-importance (the usual sources of masturbation being I am a degree holder with many professional qualifications working in a managerial post in a big company in an office in the centre of town and I am too busy to eat or sleep), that you forget that there’s the “actual sex” of doing something useful for someone (the paying customer) without doing harm to people. Sure, I get the fact that we all need to make a living. I get the fact that a steady income is paramount to survival. I do make my way into Shenton Way on a daily basis because I do need regular payments. I am also grateful that my main employer understands that I function best when I am moving around, so he uses me for the task that allow me to move. However, we’ve created a system that is unsustainable and, in many ways, a total scam. We have conditioned people to believe that they need to go to a desk and stare at a screen and bits of paper for a third of their day because their entire livelihood depends on it (one of worst forms of slavery in professional firms is the clause that prohibits you from taking on another job even if it’s in a totally different industry). Once’s entire life then gets forced around a certain company or to an extent on a certain industry. Lawyers will only hang out with lawyers, accountants only mix with accountants, PR professionals only mix with other PR professionals. No other animals tie themselves to a single source of food – the grazing animals move around for different grazing areas and the hunting animals look for the grazing animals. Governments around the world have failed miserably to build a more sustainable system and only encouraged a return to an unnatural normal with the encouragement to return to normal. While I do think that Singapore’s government did a reasonable job in managing the pandemic, it failed in trying to create something new. Instead of encouraging experimentation with work models, it proceeded to encourage the landlords to run various adds on how much better life was in the unnatural normal (incidentally the Singapore government is the largest landlord in Singapore). Masturbation only encourages people to continue jacking off rather than thinking of ways to get better. Look at the way in which professional firms get paid – selling time. Whenever you see a working professional, what you’re essentially paying for is the time that the said professional spends on your issue rather than whether the said issue gets solved at all. Senior partners in Singapore’s big law firms can charge around $1,000 an hour – the underlying words being an hour. This holds true even when you lose a case. As Mad Magazine once said – “No lawyer is ever undefeated – they get paid whether they win or lose and they continue billing after the case when they go for appeals.” The system is designed in such a way that it is not in “professionals” interest to solve the problem in the most efficient way. Thus far, only one professional has had the courage to challenge this established system by including a “success fee” clause in his contracts. The professional has made a lot of money but even he has on occasion had his success fee struck down by the courts on a few occasions. In another instance, there is a case of a judicial management where the court had no problem taxing the fees of the lawyers and restructuring professionals who charged by the hour. However, they proceeded to hold up the fees of the auctioneer of the equipment, who was the only one who could quantify the value they brought (dollars and cents) and charged based the measurable dollars and cents they brought in. The court felt it was expensive to charge based on measurable value (the auctioneer in question is not known for being cheap but they’re known for providing value which cheaper competitors do not provide). How is it common sense to accept charges on an efficient system but challenge the payment of the only party that actually can measure the value of the work they provide? Thankfully, I am not the only freak who thinks that the current economic system is an unsustainable scam designed to promote masturbation. Someone from the Temasek Review Emeritus pasted a link to a post of mine, which lead to a Forbes article where Nobel laureate Steven Chu described the world economic system as a “ponzi scheme.” The article can be found here. I may be a nobody from a Little Red Dot, so its understandable that nobody will take what I say seriously. However, Mr. Chu is more than qualified to talk about the economic system of the world. Policy makers around the globe would do well to take him seriously and restructure their systems to encourage productivity and sustainability instead of defining insanity by repeating the same things and hopping for different results.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →