Singapore Income Disparity – 2012 Edition

Hi every one! Let’s beat the same dead horse again with the same stick!

Let’s take a look at the chart above. The chart shows the average income per household member in Singapore. The numbers are from Singstats, feel free to go over there and check out the other interesting numbers the Singapore government has released.

So what is wrong with this chart? Let’s start with the glaring fact that the bottom 10% of Singaporeans earn only a 4% (10 years ago they were making 5.4%) of what the richest 10% is making. Ok, I understand that in any society there is always a population of the less fortunate people who live in relative poverty and hardship. So let’s move on to the middle class, as in literally the average 50th percentile of the population.

They make $1,794 per month, including Employer CPF contributions. Assuming they are under 50, that means they make about $1,546 every month, minus the 20% CPF ($248), they take home about $1,298.

And the people below that 50th percentile line makes even less than that. No wonder the opposition has some die hard supporters who will vote for them just because they can.

Finally, let us examine the so called high fliers in this country. For a period of time I was pretty puzzled by the fact that it is not just the middle to lower class people who have much to say about how PAP runs the country, apparently a good number of people from the middle to upper class (70-90th percentile, by income) have a lot to say as well. I couldn’t really figure out the reason. I mean if you make $5,000 a month you must be pretty damn pleased with yourself right? You are like the top 20% of the Singapore population, and by definition, the elites.

Until you realize that the very next 10%, the true elites of the country, makes more than double the amount you make and the gap seems bigger than you imagined. Their income increased by $4,742 from 2000 to 2011, while yours increased by $1,906. Same country, different pay out.

No wonder people are pissed. Maybe it’s time to revise the tax rate for the top 10%. How about changing the income tax cap from 20% to something more reasonable, like 30%?

Posted in Daily Musing | 2 Comments

台灣故事 – 無言的結局?

最近網路上最夯的新加坡新聞應該是”The Taiwan Story”. 如果你還沒看到的話,新聞稿在.

我只能說新加坡副總理說的很對。台灣正在一步步地走向一個大家不想去但是卻又不願改變方向的地方。正好符合最近剛上演的鉄達尼號3D版。早就知道附近有冰山但是卻對自己太過有自信。

從以前平起平坐到今天成爲亞洲四小龍裏吊車尾的一個國家,台灣真的該好好反省一下。排外,搞民粹,玩社會主義。再加上藍綠惡鬥,真的是把台灣過去二十年累積的老本慢慢的啃完。

今天大學生流行22K不是沒有道理的。新加坡平均薪資(2010)是台幣$63,081. 台灣人的平均收入(2009) 為$36,564. 我想差了一年應該也沒有增加多少。。。讓人人都有大學念,社會主義化的後果就是薪水大家一起分。每個人都是大學生的確是很公平,但是這個世界上必須要有贏家還有輸家。這樣搞得話聰明人何必那麽辛苦賣命苦讀? 現在個個都跑去念碩士來區分自己,何苦呢?

外國人來台灣工作還必須有兩年的經驗以及差不多$50,000的薪水,老實說現在要保護的是誰?是哪一海票的僞大學生嗎? 外國人可能還不稀罕去台灣就職,其他國家對外國勞工友善多了。

台灣不是個壞地方。我很喜歡台灣,畢竟我大半的童年是在那度過。可是看到現在台灣的情況我真的想不出來回去的理由。20年前台灣是個經濟奇跡,台灣人刻苦耐勞,爆肝苦幹。現在的台灣是選舉馬戲團,民粹主義天堂。雖然還是一樣的努力,卻搞不清楚該努力的方向。

台灣故事還在繼續,可是結局恐怕不是像鄉土劇一樣閤家歡喜,而是像缺乏觀衆的綜藝節目一樣,半途腰斬。

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M1 APN Settings

If your phone is behaving in a crazy manner (dropping calls, losing 3G data connections) like mine, the best place to start with is the APN settings.

Firmware upgrades sometimes screw up these settings and causes problems.

M1 uses the following:

Name: Sunsurf Internet
APN: sunsurf
Proxy: Not set
Port: Not set
Username: Not set
Password: Not set
Server: not set
MMSC: not set
MMS proxy: not set
MMS port: not set
MCC: 525
MNC: 05
Authentication type: not set
APN type: default, hipri
APN protocol: IPv4

——————————

Miworld MMS settings

Name: M1 MMS
APN: miworld
Proxy: not set
Port: not set
username: 65
password: user123
server: not set
MMSC: http://mmsgw:8002/
MMS proxy: 172.16.14.10
MMS port: 8080
MCC: 525
MNC: 03
Authentication type: not set
APN type: mms

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Ramen Hachifukumaru

Address: OG Orchard Point #01-13 160 Orchard Road Singapore 238842

Haven’t blogged about ramen for a while. Allow me to present Hachifukumaru to you.

Opened in December 2011, Hachifukumaru is a branch of the Nantsuttei (my review) group. Like   Maturama ramen (my review), Hachifukumaru’s specialty is the thick chicken broth ramen. The only difference being the special “ma-yu” offered in Black (roasted Negi and chicken fats) and Red (Hot and spicy) flavour.

I order the Red “ma-yu” flavour with extra char siew. The flavoured half boiled egg is a an additional topping. I find this trend disturbing, you have to add $1 for the egg that is usually part of the ramen itself. It’s like $15 gets you the plain noodles and soup, everything else has to be added as an “extra” topping.

Rants aside, lets get to the noodles and the soup. If you are expecting something as good as Nantsuttei, you will be a tad disappointed. The chicken broth is no where as flavourful as the one found at its parent outlet. The noodles have a nice texture, too bad the soup didn’t live up to expectations and the combination fell short.

The char siew is nothing to write home about. Definitely not as striking as the ones you find at Santouka (my review), it’s just the standard part of the ramen deal that everyone has grown accustomed to. Not that it is bad, but it is just…so so.

The ramen competition in Singapore is growing with many restaurants wrestling for a slice of the market share. Most of us who have been having ramen for the last half a decade are getting spoiled with choices, and that makes us more picky than ever.

Hachifukumaru is a new contestant in this field. However it did not manage to bring any new surprises to this crowded field. All in all, it’s a fairly decent restaurant, but I doubt the seasoned ramen lovers in Singapore will find something new there.

Posted in Food/美食, Ramen/拉麵, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Taste of Deinspiration – Crepes dentelles

This is so bad that I don’t even know how to begin.

It is expensive, a pack of 10 crepes will set you back by $7 or so at NTUC. Considering that it flew into this tiny island all the way from Europe, the price isn’t that prohibitive.

Until you open it up. It looks like some thing that came out from the 80s mama shop. 10 pieces of red coloured, cheap looking wraps in a transparent plastic holder. I am not saying you should over package this like how Amazon ships stuff, but this is not what I expected when I paid $7 for some European crepes.

But disappointed me the most was the taste, oh god the taste.

It tasted like the left over love letters you get 1 month after Chinese New Year, with the lid open and exposed to the air, producing the soggy feel in your mouth when you take your first bite. For those of you who don’t know how love letter taste like, just imagine the feeling you get when you take a bite into something that you expect to be crunchy, but turns out to be soft and soggy.

Bad crepes. Now I am worried about the box of butter cookies that I bought from the same company.

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Buying a flat with 1k gross income

I had my reservations when I heard you can buy a flat with a $1k nett income (after CPF). Like most of the netizens, I didn’t think it was possible.

But I like to do my homework before I flame people, especially the government. Don’t want to get sued or something.

In this case, the government is right, based on the following calculations from HDB, it is indeed possible.

The full explanation is under HDB’s Special CPF Housing Grant. The precondition is that you have to meet the eligibility criteria for HDB’s Addtional CPF Housing Grant 

HDB has a nice PDF leaflet:

http://www.hdb.gov.sg/fi10/fi10297p.nsf/ImageView/SHGLeafletEng/$file/HDB+Ad-SHG(ENG).pdf

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Singapore IT Pay Survey 2012

Well today’s Digital Life (Can’t link to the papers, probably buried somewhere within Straits Times)  had a section that showed the expected salary of some IT professionals in Singapore today. The following is a photo showing the table from the papers and how I felt inside.

Two possibilities:

1. The survey is conducted on super atas expats living in Singapore . (What I really mean is, fucking inaccurate).

2. Everyone I know working in the Singapore IT industry is being grossly underpaid.

What say you?

Posted in Daily Musing, Funny | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Foreign Talent Rage

I realized that nothing motivates me to write as much as blatant stupidity.

Today I was flamed on Facebook because I said “Education is overrated any way, y so srs.” Yes, yes, I know it’s a debatable statement, but that’s not the point of this post.

My beef is with an apparently highly educated person (with a masters) being really pissed with FTs in Singapore. Education is supposed to instill tolerance and grant knowledge about how supply and demand works.  Ok, I admit I was also pissed because he “indirectly” called me a “cheap foreign untalent” and that “cheap is not always good”.

He proclaims this truth and shares it with everyone after  his extensive tenure of TWO years in the IT industry.

Which got me thinking, people like him must be doing well, so why all this rage against the FTs? I thought the Singapore elites are supposed to be less affected?

And then it dawned upon me:

 

And the following from his LinkedIn profile confirmed my suspicions:

 

Someone has an issue with the “cheap” FTs in Singapore and can’t wait to bail out of Singapore to be probably cheap FT in another country. The irony.

Oh, and it also proves that I am right about education (at least in its present form) being over rated.

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Database upgrade

I am such a moron. Did the backup on the wrong database and wondering why there are no export dumps created.

Any way the database migration with the control panel was a bliss. At the latest version of the database and the newest version of WP as well.

Should be resuming my not so regular blog updates from here onward. Please support me by clicking on the ads! =)

Posted in Interest, Linux, Stupid | 1 Comment

Migration

Haven’t updated for 3 months or so because I can’t figure out how to migrate this lousy mySQL 4 database to mySQL 5. WordPress needs the DB upgrade before it can upgrade itself.

Quite a number of things happened these few months while I was gone. I’ve been to Taiwan and Korea and then I am going to Taiwan again this coming Wednesday. That’s a fair bit of travelling, and where my bonus ended up.

All in all 2011 has been a good year for me. I got the promotion, the girl and a lot of debt.

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