Shoddy Workmanship Results in Burnt Electrical Plug

Season's Greetings and Happy New Year.

This time I won't be ranting about the scheiss of the IT industry. Instead, I'm going to relate to you a real problem I've noticed with a widely available electrical accessories some of which are OK, whilst others downright shoddy.

Life is so convenient these days, three-in-one instant coffee packages with coffee powder, sugar and creamer premixed and sold in packets (no wonder Malaysia has the highest incidence of diabetes in the region), ready-assembled printer cables, prefabricated computer power cords and so on.

The day before yesterday, my cousin passed me a ready-assembled extension power bar to inspect and see what I could do about it. Part of the plug attached to it had melted, presumably after it was used it to power something which drew a high current.

Now here's a picture of the plug. Click on it to view it in full size.

Opening it up revealed that there was a small fire inside by the live pin, which had blackened the fuse. Lucky the fire was contained and did not spread. (See below)

Malaysia: A "High Income" nation for whom by the Year 2020?

One of the reasons I call myself "IT.Scheiss" is because of having had to report on the organisations mentioned in media which wants their advertising ringgit or just to be in their good books.

Like Demi Negara wrote in his blog post ....And the CONmen Go Marching In by doing so, I have long felt a sense of unease with what they have had to say.

You can read his blog in full here.
http://deminegara.blogspot.com/2013/09/and-conmen-go-marching-in-updated.html

Also, many of these "this," "that" and "the other" awards ceremonies are money making affairs, sometimes even the ONLY revenue stream for the companies which hold them.

Firstly, the presence of the Silly Con Valley IT industry in California has done nothing to solve unemployment and other such socio economic issues in the rest of the state, so what will it do or has it done to ease the sufferings of the rakyat.

When I was in San Francisco in 1996, I went by myself to see the Mission District in San Francisco, where I saw people living out of supermarket carts and beggars on the street asking for spare change.

Does Malaysia need to develop all these gee whiz technologies to become a developed, high-income nation?

Look around the world. How much home grown high-tech comes out of countries such as Australia and New Zealand which have a high standard of living and an enviable lifestyle.

Very little, that I know of. These countries don't even have their own home grown brand of manufactured products.

Now did I hear that "their labour costs are too high for manufacturing" whine from the apologists?

Hmmm! So they must be high-income economies then. Their workers' productivity and income are so high that they can only excel in very "First Wave" industries such as resource extraction, agricultural produce, animal products, food production and tourism.

Does Singapore have any home-grown brands of manufactured goods to speak of or home grown IT products and services to speak about but it's doing OK with its port, financial, ship servicing and trading activities.

What industries does Switzerland have besides its famed watches, cuckoo clocks, pharmaceuticals, chemical, specialised industrial equipment, agriculture, chocolates, Swiss Army Knives, cheese perhaps, ski resorts and its famed financial services industry.

Also, Switzerland has managed to remain fairly immune from the European financial crisis by remaining out of the Euro Zone. It uses its own Swiss Franc.

So why must Malaysia "move up the value chain" to become a "K-Economy" to become a "high income" nation with a gross national income (GNI) of RM48,000 per capita by the year 2020?

GNI is an average income per capita measured in International Dollars in purchasing power parity (ppp) terms, after taking into account gross income per capita, taxes,subsidies, etc per individual.

Wikipedia describes the Geary-Khamis (International Dollar) here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary%E2%80%93Khamis_dollar

According to the World Bank, Malaysia GNI was 16,530 International Dollars in 2012.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD/countries/1W-SG-TH-AU-NZ-US-MY?display=default

According to the latest United Nations Data, the conversion factor for Malaysia in 2011 was 2.16, so applying that, we get RM35,708

In 2012, Thailand's GNI per capita was 9.430 Int$ or 17,827 Baht or about half Malaysia's in ppp terms. Singapore's GNI per capita was 61,100 Int$ or Sin$92,872 (equivalent to RM238,133).

Anyway, these are average figures and averages tend to be pulled up by the high income earners in each country, and where there's wide income disparity, the GNI per capita will be much higher than the income of most persons in that country.

A better indicator of income is the median income value.

According to Department of Statistics' table of household income, mean (average) household income per month in Malaysia was RM5,000 in 2012, up 7.2% per annum from RM4,025 in 2009. However the median household income was RM3,626 per month in 2012, up 8.1% per annum from RM2,841 in 2009.

However, mean and median household incomes varied by state, with the mean ranging from RM3,168 in Kelantan to RM7,023 in Selangor in 2012 and the median from RM2,387 in Perlis to RM6,489 in the Putrajaya Federal Territory.

Median household income for the top 20% overall was RM9,796 in 2012, RM4,372 for the middle 40% and RM1,852 for the bottom 40%.

For urban areas, the medians for 2012 were RM10,912, RM5,108 and RM2,263 respectively and for rural areas they were RM5,912, RM2,883 and RM1,343 for the three percentile groups respectively.

By ethnic group - i.e. Bumiputra, Chinese, Indians and Others, the lowest household income earners were Others in rural areas with RM1,117 mean and RM1,206 median per month.

Bear in mind that these are household, not personal income figures, which could be half or less per income earner in each household. 

Assuming two income earners per household, the RM3,626 median monthly household income overall in 2012 would translate into RM21,756 per annum in 2012 and assuming the 8.1% annual growth continues, it would be RM37,528 per annum in 2020.

Likewise a mean household income of RM5,000 in 2012 would be RM48,807 per income earner in 2020 if the 7.2% annual growth rate continues.

So that RM48,000 per capita GNI by 2020 which Pemandu quotes is the average overall figure for Malaysia. Those lucky ones in Putrajaya might earn even more, whilst Others in rural areas could well earn the least.

As an estimate, assume the lowest mean household income of RM1,117 in 2012 grows at 12.1% annual growth rate for Sabah from 2009 to 2012, that would translate into mean individual income of RM14,908 per annum for individuals in this rural Others group in 2020 and that's being optimistic.

Those income figures don't take into account the effects of inflation by 2020.

What will be the purchasing power of income in 2020 compared to today, especially at the rate prices are rising today.

Malaysia's leaders, and that includes Mahathir BTW, were taken for a ride by  CON Sultants.

Have they read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins? Well I have and it jives for Malaysia pretty well.

Will Pakatan be an answer? Perhaps but looking at high property and accommodation costs in Penang, it does not seem so and I don't see anything better on the ground in Pakatan ruled Selangor where I live. All we got was another set of towkays' & tycoons' parliamentary representatives in the driver's seat.

Will a revolt in the upcoming UMNO GA put a stop to this? Perhaps, but let's see.

My question is, that if enough of the rakyat, especially the rural rakyat, are burdened economically, why did they vote for the BN in May 2013 and if they are further burdened, will they continue to vote for the BN come 2020?

Online ad revenue not making up for losses from print advertising

No dispute that more and more people are obtaining their news online or on handheld devices but neither does this AFP Relaxnews article on the Malaysian Insider nor the Overview of PEW's The State of the News Media 2012 report at the link below explicitly answer whether the the the online portals of traditional print newspapers and magazines will be able to remain viable on online advertising revenue.
Link to Malaysian Insider article:-

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/tech/article/news-outlets-losing-ground-to-tech-rivals-says-report/

Now, let's look at some excerpts from the Overview of PEW's latest report.

"New research released in this report finds that mobile devices are adding to people’s news consumption, strengthening the lure of traditional news brands and providing a boost to long-form journalism. Eight in ten who get news on smartphones or tablets, for instance, get news on conventional computers as well. People are taking advantage, in other words, of having easier access to news throughout the day – in their pocket, on their desks and in their laps."

Yee-ha! Hooray for mobile.

"Second, in the last year a small number of technology giants began rapidly moving to consolidate their power by becoming makers of “everything” in our digital lives. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and a few others are maneuvering to make the hardware people use, the operating systems that run those devices, the browsers on which people navigate, the e-mail services on which they communicate, the social networks on which they share and the web platforms on which they shop and play. And all of this will provide these companies with detailed personal data about each consumer."

Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc aren't newspapers of magazines but are making or planning to make handheld devices used for news consumption .. but!


"Already in 2011, five technology companies accounted for 68% of all online ad revenue, and that list does not include Amazon and Apple, which get most of their dollars from transactions, downloads and devices.  By 2015, Facebook is expected to account for one out of every five digital display ads sold.1"

Does not include Amazon or Apple, so the technology companies referred to are globally accessible news portals mostly based in the United States.

"There are already signs of closer financial ties between technology giants and news. As a part of YouTube’s plans to become a producer of original television content, a direction it took strongly last year, it is funding Reuters to produce original news shows.  Yahoo recently signed a content partnership with ABC News for the network to be its near sole provider of news video. AOL, after seeing less than stellar success with its attempts to produce its own original content, purchased The Huffington Post. With the launch of its Social Reader, Facebook has created partnerships with The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and others. In March 2012 Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes purchased the 98-year-old New Republic magazin"

So the future of traditional media organisations is to sell their news content to these portals, rather than to try and earn revenue through online advertising on their own portals. So while big international news organisations can benefit from this trend, to the extent that they do, to what extent will Malaysian online news portals benefit, considering that they too carry much syndicated news reports from these glopbal media players?

"But our research over the last year finds that these efforts are still limited and that few news companies have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising. So far, news organizations are mainly using the popular networking platform, Twitter, to push out their own content rather than to engage with audiences, solicit information or share information they themselves did not produce."

So much for those who thought that the use of Twitter and Facebook to engage their audiences would help to significantly increase their revenues.

And now for the kicker.

"The problems of newspapers also became more acute in 2011. Even as online audiences grew, print circulation continued to decline. Even more critically, so did ad revenues. In 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, a ratio even worse than in 2010."

This is what I've long contended - I.E. that with the inexorable move from print to online, traditional news media will not earn as much ad revenue online as they used to make from print ads.

" When circulation and advertising revenue are combined, the newspaper industry has shrunk 43% since 2000"

Basically, the newspaper industry is dying, for now in the United States at least and will follow suit later elsewhere, including in Malaysia.

"In sum, the news industry is not much closer to a new revenue model than a year earlier and has lost more ground to rivals in the technology industry. But growing evidence also suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people’s lives. That, in the end, could prove a saving factor for the future of journalism."

So news is becoming more important to people and indeed so. I for one obtain most of my news online and very rarely buy a newspaper but since the locus is shifting tp the "rivals in the technology industry," this will create some opportunities for journalists to write news articles for these technology companies - i.e. the big online portals - either directly or through media organisations but will these opportunities be evenly distributed to journalists worldwide or to a relatively fortunate minority of journalists in the developed world.

As it has been with national, provincial and city newspapers, the opportunities for journalists are geographically distributed among the respective areas where they live and work and this translates into widely dispersed, decentralised and independent media organisations which employ them but with a handful of large, globaly accessible nes portals, while it may create opportunities for some journalists in far-flung places, overall the sum total of opportunities will be very much greatly reduced, thus relegaing many journalists to the fate of unpaid bloggers like myself.

The Internet has certainly turned the world into a global village. In a traditional village - say a traditional Malay kampung, there are opportunities a handful of busnesses, such as a sundry shop and food & drinks shop, a motorcycle repair shop and perhaps some others within the village, and you'll find similar sets of opportunities in the next village 10km away and the next, and the next and the next and so on.

Likewise, the one global village offers opportunities for a handful of businesses but with its borderless reach, you'll have to find further opportunities in a global village on another planet, since those on planet Earth are already saturated.

Now I wonder what a certain self-styled new media "consultant" - who tells media organisations to embrace digital media while he himself clings on for employment in print media - has to about sustainable advertising revenue potential from going online, when studies by credible organisations such as PEW and the findings and experience of others point to the demise of journalism as a viable paying career despite the move online by major newspapers on five continents since the late 1990s.

I call people like these the liars and charlatans of the dis-information technology industry.

You can read the full Overview of the report here:-

http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/overview-4/

The details of the key findings for yourself here:-

http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/overview-4/key-findings/

And, the major trends here:-

http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/overview-4/major-trends/

Basically, it's not a pretty sight for newspapers, magazines, local TV and network TV.

Yours most trully.

IT.Sheiss

Heaven is sitting on one of these while gazing out at the beautiful river flowing by and savouring the fresh, unspoilt country air and natural scenery of northern Haida Gwaii island, British Columbia, Canada.

It's then that you'll gain that flash of insight and realise that the Internet culture is full of sheiss.