TR EMERITUS

Click to enlarge Marine Barrage’s 7 Pumps good enough? Let me illustrate to you with limited information available from public domain: 1. Based on the project data, there are 7 pumps and total discharge capacity is 280 m3 per second. 2. For a 30 minutes raining duration, the 7 pumps can handle 280x30x60= 504,000 m3 or 504 million litre of storm water. 3. For a 30 minutes of rain at the Central Area (132.7 km2 or 132.7 million m2 in area), we can work up the threshold rainfall at the point when the 7 pumps are discharging at the maximum limit. 4. The calculation is based on the following assumptions: 4.1 The 9 hydraulically operated crest gates are closed due to high tide. On the 3rd and 18th days of lunar calendar are days where sea tide is high at a certain time of the day. 4.2 The various reservoirs at the central catchment area or other storm water holding pits or pools are not taken into consideration. So it means that the storm water go nowhere except toward the reservoir forned by the barrage. 5. If 504,000 m3 of water were to precipitate into the Central Area, every m2 received 504/132.7 = 3.8 litre of water or 3.8 mm of rain fall. 1mm of rain fall corresponding to 1 litre of rain water on an 1m x 1m area or 1 m2. 6. It means if the rain is falling for 30 minutes and the rainfall is 3.8 mm. The barrage 7 pumps are at break even point. Rainfall of 3.8 mm raining down for longer than 30 minutes will cause the rain water to start accumulating in some part of the central area even if the barrage is pumping at full capacity. Just to put thing into prospective, the following days in July 2021 for the whole island, with total rainfall more than 3.8 mm: Day -- Daily Rainfall Total (mm) 03 -- 25.4 10 -- 11.2 11 -- 21.8 12 -- 43.2 13 -- 75 31 -- 9.6 8. Calculations for the other areas of threshold rainfall for 30 minutes duration of rain based on the same assumptions given in Section 4 above are as follow: 8.1 West (201.3 km2), threshold rainfall is 2.5 mm 8.2 North (134.5 km2), threshold rainfall is 3.7 mm 8.3 Central (132.7 km2), threshold rainfall is 3.8mm 8.4 North East (103.9 km2), threshold rainfall is 4.85 mm 8.5 East (93.1 km2), threshold rainfall 5.4 mm 9. On 24 Aug 2021 about 10 am, the Station S213 located at Coronation Walk (1.32427, 103.8097) recorded a rainfall of 1 mm, Bukit Timah Area is 17.53 km2 (17,500,000 m2), therefore the storm water falling onto the area is 17,500,000 litre or 17,500 m3 or 7 Olympic sized swimming pool, it is going to take more than 1 minutes for the 7 pumps at the barrage to pump the water into the sea just for the storm water from Bukit Timah alone. Another question is whether any flow control gate directing the storm water toward the barrage (if any) along the canal install or not. At that moment, was the gate closed, partially or fully open. If there is such a flow control gate (rate of flow is not know to me) and it was fully open then, I guess the flood would not be so bad.   Chengmin Wang * Article first appear on the author's Facebook page.  Read More →

One of the things that I often joked about when I started my parental journey was the fact that I would probably have to build an arsenal of guns to keep boys away from my little girl. I was once a horny little boy and becoming a father made me realise that the last thing, I’d want was for my daughter to deal with boys like me. However, my assumption of basic parenting was from the pre-smartphone age. The Evil Teen who is now the Evil Young Lady lived her entire social life in cyberspace and instead of waiting up nights worrying that she was up to no good, I ended up praying for her to get out and meet people. I wasn’t alone in this experience. My friends had the same battle with the kid and the smartphone. Whenever I got together with one of my best friends, the conversation would always centre around how our kids were glued to their phones and how they didn’t quite understand the costs of paying data. Well, it seems that my friends and I can relax a little. On 31 August 2021, Singapore had a new richest man, which is Mr. Forrest Li, the Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited. The full report on Mr. Li’s accension to become Singapore’s richest can be found at: [LINK] Sea Limited is Southeast Asia’s most valuable company and it is described as a “consumer internet company,” with businesses ranging from game development, publishing, ecommerce and fintech. For Singapore’s readers, the most visible part of Sea’s business is probably Shopee. Mr. Li, unlike most of our local tycoons actually has a pretty compelling story. He was born in China, educated in the USA. Worked as an HR consultant and found that he loved playing games on the internet and so built his business around it. As a parent with a kid tied to the phone, Mr. Li’s story gives me some hope. In my generation (Gen x), video games were what you did for fun and then grew out of. Mr. Li’s story gives Asia’s “career obsessed” parents some hope. Mr. Li has shown that the kid’s hobby might actually be a viable career path and God forbid, the foundation of a fortune. However, the story of Mr. Li’s rise to the top is not just a story of giving parents hope that the kid locked up in the room playing games all day might actually have a career path. His story is precisely the success story that Singapore needs. He was a kid with a passion, who somehow found a way of making this passion pay. He’s created a business that is part of the “future” and capitalizing on changing trends (think of how ordering online and paying for things online is becoming a “normal” part of life.) If you look at the list of richest Singaporeans, you’ll notice that Singapore approaches wealth creation or entrepreneurship creation in the same way that it approaches attempts to create sporting success. There will be a load of schemes throwing money at all sorts of programs to develop a grass roots movement for sporting success or entrepreneurship. Then someone who was parachuted into a prominent position will lose patience with the slow pace of things (people who are parachuted into cushy jobs are usually blind to the reality that the reality of sporting success or entrepreneurial success is usually dim and involves a long hard slog) and will go for the easy solution – buying people from elsewhere or in the case of billionaires, giving tax breaks. Just take a look at the latest Forbes List of Billionaires: [LINK] Of the top ten, Mr. Li stands out for one very obvious reason. He is the only one who built a game changing business in Singapore. Li Xiting of Mindray, Zhang Yong of Haidilao and most famously Eduardo Severin of Facebook, built their businesses elsewhere and then settled in Singapore thanks for generous conditions offered by the government. The only other person in the top five you can be described as “self-made” is Goh Cheng Liang of Nippon Paint, who built business years ago. If you look at the top ten richest in Singapore, you’ll find that if they’re not imported from elsewhere, inherited their wealth. Of the native-born fortunes, only Goh Cheng Liang and Wee Cho Yaw of UOB belong to the generation that actually built the wealth. The nature of the top ten fortunes would suggests that although Singapore is a wealthy nation, there’s actually very little genuine wealth creation. In simple terms, if you didn’t make elsewhere or didn’t get lucky in the genetic lottery, you’re not going to make it and the best you’ll ever be is a servant to those who already have it. Mr. Li, and his gang of Ge Yang and David Chen at Sea, Dr Shi Xu of Nanofilm Technologies International (Dr. Shi has just replaced Professor Inderjit Singh as Chairman of NTUitive) and Tan Min-Liang of Razer are the odd balls on Singapore’s wealth list because they are actually creating wealth rather than investing it in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world. In a list of 50, we only have five genuine creators of wealth. When you consider how the economic landscape has changed, this is not a good sign. Singapore cannot repeat the old model of doing things cheaper than the West (China and India have more people willing to work cheap than we have people). Sure, we can rely on being the stable regional headquarters but once countries in the region get their act together (reduce corruption etc), that may no longer be so viable. We need bright sparks who can create wealth. The government always gets orgasmic whenever we get billionaire decides to become Singaporean. Think of how excited we got when Sir James Dyson paid millions for a home. However, what does that actually do for the rest of us, other than to remind us that real estate is very expensive? We need people who can think. They don’t have to be native born, but they have to be able to work with Singapore. I go back to my previous posting about Mr. Calvin Cheng’s intellectual laziness in his dismissal of a liberal arts education in Singapore. Liberal arts, don’t train you directly but they prepare you to think. Let’s take note that societies that create music and art also happen to be the societies that produce scientific innovation and entrepreneurship. Mr. Li and the team at Sea Limited have done more than just give parents hope that their video games obsessed children might have a viable career. He’s also shown us that Singapore needs people who can think and create wealth from game changing activities rather than just sitting there and inheriting it.   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 →

‘Singaporeans’ anxieties over foreign work pass holders are being addressed, and the government has to adjust its policies to manage the quality, numbers and concentration of foreigners here’, said PM Lee. Such is the National Day message as detailed in the ST. Now straight to the point, should Singaporeans take comfort in this assurance and relax? Consider this. In 2013 we were told, ‘If you look at other countries — China, Vietnam, even in India — they’re not talking about work-life balance, they are hungry, anxious, about to steal your lunch.’ But in his 2004 inaugural speech, work-life balance was an emphasis, to the best of my recollection. What happened in the intervening nine years? Perhaps the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis had taken its toll upon us and had upset the balance, forcing us to write-off work-life balance, and we are not able to have it restored till today. And yet again, the comparison of a national day speech made in 2011 and the national day message this year are almost identical. What exactly is the issue now? Let us get to the basics, as trivial as they may seem, let us state the obvious. Human beings need the minimum of resources to sustain themselves. Some want more to obtain their luxuries. The thought that is bugging many of our minds is, are those seeking luxuries in this zero-sum game causing many others to be forced into the gig economy? If so, how do we address this situation? It has to be emphasised clearly at this juncture that those working in the gig economy are largely doing so to meet their economic needs in work areas which do not commensurate with what they are actually capable of. In order to acquire those resources needed for a decent living, one needs to be employed, whether by an external person or self. Not only employed according to some definition in law, but sufficiently employed, which is optimal to one’s fair economic capacity. In our local context there is an intricate, seldom talked about matter in that regard, which needs to be urgently addressed and has hardly been addressed by the establishment, that is underemployment. At present, the status of being economically occupied being the binary status as being either employed or unemployed, it seems to be inadequate in description and requires tweaking. Since those operating in the gig economy are often engaged in occupations way below their capacity, are they actually deemed to be sufficiently employed? To consider them employed, seems to be intended to put on record that they need not be included in any further economic or manpower policy considerations. Perhaps after some compensation for their underemployment, they become statistics, and therefore the establishment is duly absolved. It is now time for the establishment to officially recognise that there is an intermediate situation between the employed and the unemployed, there obviously being substantial underemployment in our current economic situation. Consider this. Officially, the binary status of being unemployed or employed would only be indicated as 0 and 1. If the underemployment in the economy gets assessed and recognised as a numerical between 0 and 1, it would be more telling of the total overall state of the national employment situation. Those who are underemployed could be indicated as a numerical indicator between 0 and 1, which would be more reflective of their situation. This will more accurately reflect the employment numbers and have them duly addressed. If let us say a hypothetical situation of employment arises, where 75% of the working population are in regular employment and are regarded as employed in the conventional sense. If the other 25% are in a gig economy employment that would be deemed full employment as far as the government is concerned and they need not take any further action, simply because all are deemed employed. Would that be appropriate? Underemployment should be reflected in the statistical numbers and be explained, especially with a rapidly increasing foreigner population.   Sivakumaran Chellappa      Read More →