After reports that The Edge Media Group wanted to sell off its online political news portal The Malaysian Insider, the online-only publication's editor Jahabar Sadiq finally bade goodbye and thanked all its readers in a post shortly before noon on 14th March. In Malay they would say it "tutup kedai" (closed shop), whilst in Thai they would say it "cheng" (went bust), like several others before it.
Goodbye from The Malaysian Insider
BY JAHABAR SADIQ, EDITOR
Published: 14 March 2016 11:58 AM
Goodbye readers from near and far, and those reading us in Malaysia despite the government block.
The Edge Media Group has decided to shut down The Malaysian Insider from midnight today, for commercial reasons. Perhaps it is fitting that we go offline at the start of the Ides of March.
I hope we have served you well since our first day of going live on February 25, 2008. And I hope others will continue to serve you in our absence.
We worked as impartial journalists to inform Malaysians and other readers so that they make informed decisions. We worked to make all voices heard in this marketplace of ideas.
But our work in The Malaysian Insider has now come to an end in a Malaysia that more than ever requires more clarity, transparency and information.
All said and done, I want to thank everyone of you in Malaysia, around the world, and those who have been with The Malaysian Insider from day one until now for your support, well wishes and criticism during these fantastic eight years and 18 days of The Malaysian Insider.
I won’t put down my pen, I won’t lay down my camera, I won’t shut up and I won’t be blinkered or turn a deaf ear to what goes on in Malaysia and the world. And I urge all of you to do the same.
And I shall always be the biggest fan of this news portal called The Malaysian Insider.
Goodbye.
The Editor
* Jahabar Sadiq runs The Malaysian Insider until tonight.
http://www.themalaysianoutsider.com/malaysia/article/goodbye-from-the-malaysian-insider
This is unfortunate for its 59 writers and staff who will be out of work from midnight, including my former colleague who was editor of Mobile World Magazine during the few years she was with us. Hopefully, they will be absorbed into other subsidiaries of The Edge Media Group, which publishes the respected The Edge financial and business newspaper, whilst hopefully others will find work with whatever remaining media organisations still standing in Malaysia or perhaps with foreign publications.
Better still, look for work in other areas of media, such as in public relations, advertising, corporate communications, graphics design, video production or television, since based upon the experience in developed countries in North America and Europe, the golden age of news media are over and it's heading that way in Malaysia too.
It's not that it's a bed of roses in these other kinds of media but at least public relations and corporate communications still pay much better than journalism and several of my former journalist colleagues have made that transition and are earning much more and some even made that transition when the newspaper we were writing for paid well, paid us generous bonuses and ex-gratia plus generous medical and other benefits, especially when they got married and had to prepare to take on heavier expenses of buying a home and raising a family, since even all that income was not enough as they began their next phase in life and they were quite frank about it.
About 10 years ago, one of my friends who wrote for the gadgets magazine CHiP in Malaysia switched her career to being an industrial engineer with one of the semiconductor production plants in Malaysia and she has not looked back since. She's lucky that she graduated with a degree in electronics engineering, though there are other options for others in industries besides media.
According to Wikipedia:-
"The Malaysian Insider was established by Png Hong Kwang and Sreedhar Subramaniam in December 2007. Png is a journalist, and Subramaniam is the former Chief Operating Officer of the free-to-air Malaysian TV channel ntv7. A group of businessmen and journalists close to former Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi started the news portal as a counter to Malaysiakini, which was deemed unfriendly to the Barisan Nasional (BN). When Abdullah resigned in 2009, BN stopped financing the news agency. After talking to several connections, the news portal top management re-secured funding with help from a 30-something Penang-born businessman with close ties to the current BN leadership."
"The organisation is then led by Chief Executive Officer and Editor Jahabar Sadiq, who has worked as a journalist in the region since 1988"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Malaysian_Insider
Despite that description on Wikipedia, that The Malaysian Insider was generally favourable to the ruling party, the slant of its articles gave some, including myself the impression, rightly or wrongly, that it was generally pro-opposition, which it sometimes criticised.
Well, when it was launched in February 2008, shortly before the 12th general elections, there was an increasingly intense internal faction fight between former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir and then sitting prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, both from the UMNO party, the leading party within the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition and the speculation was that the financial backers behind The Malaysian Insider were loyal to Tun Abdullah, which the Wikipedia account corroborates.
After Tun Abdullah stepped down as prime minister shortly after the 2008 general elections and was replaced by the current prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Abdul Razak, The Malaysian Insider continued with its critical reporting and whilst at times it was also critical of the opposition, it was still regarded my many, especially in pro-establishment circles, to be generally pro-opposition.
The Edge Media group acquired The Malaysian Insider in June 2014.
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/dr-m-wants-popularity-contest-against-pm
However, the portal continued with its anti-establishment slant and more recently, generally took a position opposed to Najib over the current 1MDB soverign fund issue and the said RM2.6 billion donation which was transferred into a personal account of Najib, something which the prime minister has not denied.
Recently, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, Malaysia's telecommunication services, postal services and online content regulator, blocked online access to The Malaysian Insider from within Malaysia, citing the reason being that one of The Malaysian Insider's articles had caused public confusion by quoting an unnamed source from a Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) advisory panel. However, this block and that of other sites were not all that effective, since more tech-savvy readers were able to get around the block through proxy sites or by changing the Internet Protocol (IP) settings on their PC.
Meanwhile, The Malaysian Insider was loss-making and had bled The Edge Media Group to the tune of RM10 million in the 20 months since it was acquired. In his statement of 14th March 2016 with regards this closure, The Edge Media Group publisher and group CEO, Ho Kay Tat said:-
"TEMG has incurred losses of around RM10 million in the 20 months since we acquired TMI in June, 2014 and we are no longer in a position to keep it going."
Ho ended his statement with:-
"The closure of TMI should serve as a reminder to those of us in the media industry as well as the public at large that good journalism cannot be sustained without commercial support. And when good journalism stops, society is the loser."
http://english.astroawani.com/business-news/malaysian-insider-not-profitable-edge-media-group-98536
Ho is so right about good journalism not being sustainable without commercial support. Unfortunately, this is so true about other kinds of media too, including media dedicated to writing about the information and communications technology and its industry.
The Edge Media Group had approached three other media groups which had shown interest in taking over The Malaysian Insider and and there also was an offer of a management buy out but all those did not work out.
Meanwhile, writing from his exile in Manchester, England in his The Corridors of Power column on his blog, Malaysia Today, pro-Najib blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin provides an overview alleging that The Malaysian Insider had been set up and financed by wealthy individuals to serve as a media voice to serve their respective political agendas and now that they had not succeeded, thus The Malaysian Insider had outlived its usefulness and had become a financial liability to them.
The closing down of The Malaysian Insider and other matters
March 14, 2016
THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Raja Petra Kamarudin
When The Edge Media Group (TEMG) bought The Malaysia Insider (TMI) in June 2014 (READ HERE), it was with a specific purpose in mind. And that specific purpose revealed itself soon after that when TMI spearheaded the attacks on Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak later that same year.
No doubt, the usual hype is that TMI is an independent news portal that will not take sides and will report the truth without fear or favour and all that usual nonsense that news portals such as Malaysiakini (a.k.a. Suara Anwar Ibrahim), Malaysia Chronicle (a.k.a. Suara Tian Chua) and so on spew out.
The truth is TMI is as independent as Adolf Hitler was a Jew lover and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is a democrat. TMI, at least after June 2014, existed for only one reason and for no other reason other than just that one reason — which was to serve the ANC (Anti-Najib Campaign) in its effort to bring down Najib.
It would have been very profitable for TMI had the ANC succeeded in ousting Najib in July 2015 like they had planned. By then TMI would have been a year in operation and the rewards for just a year’s work would have been very lucrative. And we would have seen that rich Chinaman behind TMI get even richer.
Of course, it did not happen in July 2015 as planned. Instead, Najib axed those who were trying to oust him. So they needed to shift the date to October and then to December. But still Najib did not fall and Malaysia entered the New Year with Najib still as Prime Minister. And that was when TMI realised that Najib was never going to be ousted as planned after all.
By then TMI had blown RM10 million, according to their own admission (READ HERE). That, of course, makes sense since they have been operating for about 20-21 months at a cost of RM500,000 a month. And Tong Kooi Ong, the one-time Anwar Ibrahim crony who became rich with Anwar’s help, did not see why he should continue with TMI and blow yet another RM15-20 million until 2018.
And what happens if Umno-Barisan Nasional wins the 2018 general election and Najib remains the Umno President cum Prime Minister after the 2018 Umno party election? Does TMI then close down after blowing a total of RM25-30 million or does it go on and blow another RM6 million for every year it stays in business post-2018?
So, yes, as Ho Kay Tat said, it is a business decision and a decision that is necessary since they can’t sell off TMI and recover the RM10 million they have lost so far.
To these Chinamen, at the end of the day, it is all about the money. RM10 million is nothing had Najib been ousted in July 2015. They can get back hundreds of millions in government favours and contracts on the RM10 million they had spent. But if that is not going to happen then why continue to spend more money?
Tong Kooi Ong wants to sell TMI for RM20 million so that he can recover his RM10 million plus make a profit of RM10 million on the deal. So he approached Umno to try to get Umno to buy it.
Umno, however, realised that what they would be buying would be an empty shell as all the staff would just resign and go set up another news portal called The Malaysian Outsider. So what is Umno buying for RM20 million?
And that was when they decided to close down TMI. But of course they are going to try to make it appear like they are closing down because of action by the Malaysian government that does not respect free speech and the independence of the media and so on. The truth is the Chinaman is not going to blow another RM10 million or RM20 million after already blowing RM10 million unless he can get something out of it.
You mean you really thought that Tong Kooi Ong blew RM10 million so far because of his love from Malaysia and to help the country? If you really believe that then you probably also believe that 8 is a lucky number while 4 is an unlucky number. And what else do you believe: that red ang paus on Chinese New Year is good luck while white ang paus is bad luck?
Hmm…Malaysians so easily believe whatever suits them. No wonder many believe that the 4th March 2016 launch of the Save Malaysia Campaign with the signing of the Citizens’ Declaration is Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s way of seeking redemption and paying back for his sins to the country.
I remember about ten years ago during the PKR annual assembly or party convention in Penang when Azmin Ali lashed out at all those who supported or cooperated with Dr Mahathir in his bid to oust Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
Azmin stood on stage and said, “Semua yang bersekongkong dengan Mahathir boleh blah.” This can translate to mean all those who collaborate with Mahathir can fxxx off. ‘Blah’ would be the Bahasa Malaysia equivalent of…well, you know what it translates to.
That was about ten years ago. And when Azmin shouted that, Anwar Ibrahim was sitting beside him and was smirking, just like the cat that had swallowed the canary. Anwar made it very clear that Azmin had his permission to scold us, or maybe he even told Azmin to do it.
Anyway, ten years hence and now Azmin and Anwar both bersekongkong dengan Mahathir. In fact, they even accept Mahathir as the new de facto opposition leader to replace Anwar. How times have changed.
Ten years ago we were told that if we collaborate with Mahathir then we are traitors. Today, Mat Sabu says all those who oppose Mahathir are cowards (READ HERE). Actually, Mat Sabu used the word pengecut. And pengecut means more than just coward. Pengecut comes from the word kecut or shrunk. So figure out what Mat Sabu is referring to when he says ‘shrunk’. Apa dia yang sudah kecut?
And, yes, this is the same Mat Sabu who called Mahathir Mahazalim and Anwar Al Juburi.
Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (Ku Li) made a statement in reference to my interview in the NST recently. Basically, Ku Li denies that his chap had met me and had asked me to sign that Statutory Declaration in June 2008.
Anyway, I do not want to say too much on the matter because those who are in the know would know what really happened. I just want to publish this photograph of the person that most likely one million Malaysians know works for Ku Li and is Ku Li’s attack dog.
Beware the Ides of March, Nik Azmi a.k.a. Bul. You can twist and you can turn but you can never avoid the truth finally being revealed. And make sure that people don’t start calling you Nik Azmi a.k.a. Bul a.k.a. Bull…if you know what I mean.
http://www.malaysia-today.net/the-closing-down-of-the-malaysian-insider-and-other-matters/
Whilst I do not approve of his use of the derogatory term "Chinamen", still this should serve as a reminder to idealistic writers who see themselves and the media they write for as "fighting for justice, human rights, the interests of the people" and so forth, when in fact they could well be serving certain powerful wealthy interests against other powerful wealthy interests, instead of being a "Fourth Estate" observing and commenting from above the fray.
Meanwhile on 29 February 2016, The Star reported that another online news portal, The Rakyat Post (The People's Post) had shut down.
"KUALA LUMPUR: The Rakyat Post news portal closed shop today."
"The company, owned by Wespacom Sdn Bhd, told its staff of the decision to cease operations at a meeting with several representatives of its 60 employees at Menara MBSB here on Monday."
"It told its employees that they would have to lodge a complaint with the Labour Department or seek industrial action in order to get their two months’ unpaid salaries."
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/02/29/the-rakyat-post-closes-shop/
However, the following day, TV channel Astro Awani reported that the shutdown was only temporary.
"The Rakyat Post has been temporarily shut down following funding issues faced by the online news portal."
http://english.astroawani.com/malaysia-news/rakyat-post-temporarily-shuts-down-96753
Then on 10 March 2016 Astro Awani reported that The Rakyat post had resurfaced again aftera brief hiatus.
"KUALA LUMPUR: After it was announced that The Rakyat Post would be shutting down their operations beginning March, the online news portal today resurfaced, much to the surprise of its ex-staff."
"The news portal's former editorial team claimed to be in the dark over this new development, as there had been no communication between them and the management since the shutdown announcement last Feb 29."
"In the announcement, the news portal's management had cited funding issues as the main reason for the shutdown."
http://english.astroawani.com/malaysia-news/rakyat-post-resurfaced-after-shutdown-ex-staff-dark-98141
A quick check on The Rakyat Post's website this 14th of March 2016 shows that its stories are up to date.
http://www.therakyatpost.com/
However, who it is who has revived and is financing it remains a mystery.
The Rakyat Post is said to lean more towards the establishment, though looking more closely at its content on 29 February 2016, I could see that it carried plenty of lifestyle, local and general interest articles, much like the lifestyle and city sections of most newspapers and perhaps would have been more successful had it been a print rather than and online publications, since I personally find the reading experience of these kinds of articles to be better in print, when one can read them whilst leaning back in a couch or whilst seated at a table sipping a cup of coffee.
Perhaps that's just my personal perception and whilst I hardly buy a print newspaper or magazine these days and read most of the news on my PC screen, still, on those rare occasions when I buy a print newspaper or read it in a cafe, I found the reading experience so much better, than on a PC or handheld device.
Whatever one may feel about it, these two recent online portal closures due to loss making operations only goes to debunk the claims made by new media advocates and self-styled new media CON-sultants that online and digital are the "future" of media, when in reality it has sounded the death knell of media.
Whilst indeed, the inexorable migration of readership from print to online and digital has undeniably adversely impacted the circulation and advertising revenues of print media, at the same time, the growth and quantum of online and digital advertising revenue for media organisations has not made up for their loss in print advertising revenue and unless online and digital advertising revenue for media catches up fast, there will be more tragic closures such as those of The Rakyat Post and The Malaysian Insider.
Right now, I strongly advise school leavers and mass communications students to avoid going into journalism, since they could well find themselves out of work in their mid-30s or mid-40s, unless online and digital media advertising revenue makes a dramatic leap soon.
Meanwhile, Mobile World Magazine which I wrote for from February 2006 till January 2011 published its last print edition of January/February 2014 and continued online-only but that too did not last and the latest article on its website is dated 29th of May 2015 this 15th of March 2016.
http://www.mobileworld.my/index.php
That's life folks. With a few exceptions such as business and financial media and journalism, for most, the glory days journalism are otherwise over or could take decades to return. So it's best to move on.
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end, but the sun is slowly setting on this industry and on journalism as a viable paying career, so better look elsewhere where the sun is still shining or is rising.
I am yours truly
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.my/
22 January 2016
EDGE DOWNSIZING, TMI FOR SALE, KINIBIZ TO SHUTTER
So, real life is proving a particular, haughty, arrogant and obnoxious, self-styled new media "consultant" wrong about the "future" of digital and Internet-based media, and the "future" of journalism as a viable paying career, as media readership increasing moves into cyberspace, thus dragging media publication online too and advertising too.
That much, such charlatans will proclaim widely but downplay or suppress the other side that online advertising dollar for traditional news media has been found through experience to be far below print advertising dollar by a factor of around 1 to 10, which surely cannot sustain large numbers of journalists in well paid, secure employment.
Hey! It must sure be great to brand oneself as a "new media advocate" and get invited to speak at events, functions, round tables, radio talk shows, have your articles carried by various media for a fee, to sell your "consultancy" services to media publishers, political parties, businesses, NGOs and so forth right?. I'm sure there's plenty of moolah to be made there.
I have oftentimes said that branding is the art of selling sweetened, frozen excreta as a very unique and innovative "chocolate ice cream", and that's true of much branding exercises in Malaysia. Like how some Malaysian or China made home electrical appliances are branded by a certain company with grand American or European-sounding names, but which break down shortly after the warranty period is over and customers have to put up with shitty service by their service centre.
Hell! Even the company's name sounds very similar to that of a famous and reputable Japanese brand of consumer electronics and electrical appliances. But this Malaysian company's share price has been on a bull run, as the plebian masses buy its sub-standard products in droves, just because they look pretty and are cheap, then they meekly put up with its shitty quality and shitty customer services. But that's a topic for another story.
Back to the original topic of this post. In this report by The Star Online below, The Edge, a respected financial and business newspaper in Malaysia is downsizing with plans to retrench staff. The Edge is published in print and online.
The pro-opposition The Malaysian Insider which The Edge Media Group acquired in September 2014 is now to be sold off.
The NGO-funded, pro-opposition, subscription-based online-only news portal Malaysiakini decided to make a foray into business media and launched Kinibiz in print and online in 2013 but now plans to close it down on February 1, which happens to be the anniversary of the establishment of Kuala Lumpur as city with the status of a Federal Territory, though I'm quite sure it's unrelated.
Star Online article follows below.
Cheers
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.com
Friday, 22 January 2016 | MYT 2:06 PM
Edge downsizing, TMI for sale, Kinibiz to shutter
PETALING JAYA: The Edge Media Group is downsizing in efforts to focus on its core business.
An internal memo sighted by The Star revealed that the group will be retrenching some staff from various companies, with others assigned new roles within the organisation.
With the two-month suspension of their weekly and daily publications significantly impacting their financials, the downsizing could be the group's way of weathering weak business and economic conditions in 2016 and 2017.
The Home Ministry had suspended the group's publishing permit for three months from July 27 last year, and the Kuala Lumpur High Court on Sept 21 quashed the Home Ministry's decision to suspend its two publications.
With plans to have their own TV news program on a broadcaster falling through, the group's video content will be reconfigured away from spot news coverage due to a lack of competitive advantage.
According to a source, The Malaysian Insider, which is also owned by The Edge, is also up for sale, while both print and online editions of Kinibiz will shut down on Feb 1.
Headed by joint CEO and founding editor P. Gunasegaram, Kinibiz began as an online-only business news portal in Feb 2013.
It went to a subscription-based service in May the same year and rolled out a fortnightly print business magazine in April 2015, which was under review due to poor sales.
The official announcement will reportedly be made next week.
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/01/22/edge-downsizing-tmi-for-sale-kinibiz-to-shutter/
That much, such charlatans will proclaim widely but downplay or suppress the other side that online advertising dollar for traditional news media has been found through experience to be far below print advertising dollar by a factor of around 1 to 10, which surely cannot sustain large numbers of journalists in well paid, secure employment.
Hey! It must sure be great to brand oneself as a "new media advocate" and get invited to speak at events, functions, round tables, radio talk shows, have your articles carried by various media for a fee, to sell your "consultancy" services to media publishers, political parties, businesses, NGOs and so forth right?. I'm sure there's plenty of moolah to be made there.
I have oftentimes said that branding is the art of selling sweetened, frozen excreta as a very unique and innovative "chocolate ice cream", and that's true of much branding exercises in Malaysia. Like how some Malaysian or China made home electrical appliances are branded by a certain company with grand American or European-sounding names, but which break down shortly after the warranty period is over and customers have to put up with shitty service by their service centre.
Hell! Even the company's name sounds very similar to that of a famous and reputable Japanese brand of consumer electronics and electrical appliances. But this Malaysian company's share price has been on a bull run, as the plebian masses buy its sub-standard products in droves, just because they look pretty and are cheap, then they meekly put up with its shitty quality and shitty customer services. But that's a topic for another story.
Back to the original topic of this post. In this report by The Star Online below, The Edge, a respected financial and business newspaper in Malaysia is downsizing with plans to retrench staff. The Edge is published in print and online.
The pro-opposition The Malaysian Insider which The Edge Media Group acquired in September 2014 is now to be sold off.
The NGO-funded, pro-opposition, subscription-based online-only news portal Malaysiakini decided to make a foray into business media and launched Kinibiz in print and online in 2013 but now plans to close it down on February 1, which happens to be the anniversary of the establishment of Kuala Lumpur as city with the status of a Federal Territory, though I'm quite sure it's unrelated.
Star Online article follows below.
Cheers
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.com
Friday, 22 January 2016 | MYT 2:06 PM
Edge downsizing, TMI for sale, Kinibiz to shutter
PETALING JAYA: The Edge Media Group is downsizing in efforts to focus on its core business.
An internal memo sighted by The Star revealed that the group will be retrenching some staff from various companies, with others assigned new roles within the organisation.
With the two-month suspension of their weekly and daily publications significantly impacting their financials, the downsizing could be the group's way of weathering weak business and economic conditions in 2016 and 2017.
The Home Ministry had suspended the group's publishing permit for three months from July 27 last year, and the Kuala Lumpur High Court on Sept 21 quashed the Home Ministry's decision to suspend its two publications.
With plans to have their own TV news program on a broadcaster falling through, the group's video content will be reconfigured away from spot news coverage due to a lack of competitive advantage.
According to a source, The Malaysian Insider, which is also owned by The Edge, is also up for sale, while both print and online editions of Kinibiz will shut down on Feb 1.
Headed by joint CEO and founding editor P. Gunasegaram, Kinibiz began as an online-only business news portal in Feb 2013.
It went to a subscription-based service in May the same year and rolled out a fortnightly print business magazine in April 2015, which was under review due to poor sales.
The official announcement will reportedly be made next week.
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/01/22/edge-downsizing-tmi-for-sale-kinibiz-to-shutter/
28 December 2015
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A Blessed Christmas to all Christians and a Happy New Year to all.
That said, I share this blog by Charles Hugh Smith which is food for thought with regards the information and services economy.
In it, he debunks many of the myths promoted by those paperback writers who contributed so much to the techno-politico-socio-economo-utopian mythology surrounding computing and information technology.
It's great to see that more people are speaking up about what I have been ranting about for years against the all the media spin by the industry's boosters.
Hopefully, more national decision makers, including government ministers, will take cognisance of this and not be fooled by the hype, hoohah, bullshit and ballyhoo of the disinformation technology industry.
Charles Hugh Smith's article follows below.
Cheers
Yours truly
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.my/
=========================
Wishful thinking is not a solution.
The world of work has changed, and the rate of change is increasing. Despite the hopes of those who want to turn back the clock to the golden era of high-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs and an abundance of secure service-sector white collar jobs, history doesn't have a reverse gear (tm).
Those hoping for history to reverse gears place their faith in these wishful-thinking fantasies:
1. That automation will create more jobs than it destroys because that's what happened in the 1st and 2nd Industrial Revolutions. The wishful thinkers expect the Digital / 3rd Industrial Revolution to follow suite, but it won't: previous technological revolutions generated tens of millions of new low-skill jobs to replace the low-skill jobs that were lost to technology.
Millions of farm laborers moved to the factory floor in the 1st Industrial Revolution, and then millions of displaced factory workers moved to sales and clerk jobs in the 2nd Industrial Revolution.
Even white-collar jobs that supposedly required a college degree could be learned in a matter of hours, days or at most weeks, and little effort was required to stay current.
The Digital/3rd Industrial Revolution is not creating tens of millions of low-skill jobs, and it never will. Even worse for the wishful thinking crowd, the 3rd Digital Revolution is eating tech jobs along with the full spectrum of service-sector jobs.
Those expecting to replace low-skill service jobs with armies of coders will be disappointed, because coding is itself being automated.
The new jobs that are being created are few in number and highly demanding.Jobs are no longer strictly traditional boss-employee; the real growth is in peer-to-peer collaboration and what I term hybrid work performed by Mobile Creatives, workers with highly developed technical/creative/social skillsets who are comfortable working with rapidly changing technologies, who enjoy constant learning and are highly adaptive.
The work that is being created in the Digital/3rd Industrial Revolution is contingent and thus insecure. The only security that is attainable in fast-changing environments is the security offered by broad-based skillsets, great adaptability, a voracious appetite for new learning and a keenly developed set of "soft skills": communication, collaboration, self-management, etc.
The problem is the number of these jobs is far smaller than the number of jobs that will be eaten by software, AI and robotics. the number of workers who can transition productively to this far more demanding and insecure work environment is also much smaller than the workforce displaced by software/robotics.
In short, we need a new system; wishful thinking isn't a solution.
2. That the U.S. can unilaterally demand the right to export its goods and services to others at full price while refusing to accept competing imports. In effect, the fantasy is to return to 1955, when the U.S. could export goods at full pop to the allies who were rebuilding their war-shattered economies. Imports were few because those economies were busy focusing on their own domestic needs.
Trade is a two-way street. Fair trade is a moving target, depending on which side of the trade you happen to be on. Everybody wants to export their surplus at top prices, but competition lowers prices and profits. This forces global corporations to seek cost advantages by lowering the cost of components and labor.
3. The wishful thinkers want strong corporate profits to prop up their stock market and pension funds, but they don't want corporations to do what is necessary to reap strong profits, i.e. move production of commoditized goods and services overseas or replace human labor with cheaper automation.
You can't have it both ways.
Wishful thinkers choose to ignore the reality that roughly half of all U.S. based global corporate sales and profits are reaped overseas. It makes zero financial sense to pay a U.S. worker $20/hour, and pay the insanely expensive costs of sickcare/"healthcare" in the U.S. when the work can be done closer to the actual markets for the goods and services at a fraction of the cost.
Memo to all the armchair wishful thinkers: if you want to compete globally with a high-cost U.S. work force and no automation, be my guest. Put your own money and time at risk and go make it happen. Go hire people at top dollar and provide full benefits, and then go out and make big profits in the global marketplace.
The armchair pundits and ivory tower academics would quickly lose their shirts and come back broke. That's why they wouldn't dare risk their own security, capital and time doing what they demand of others.
4. The wishful thinkers decry the lack of "good-paying" jobs yet they refuse to look at the reasons why employing people in the traditional boss/employee hierarchy no longer makes sense. The armchair pundits and ivory tower academics have never hired even one person with their own money. These protected privileged are living in a fantasy-world of academia, think tanks and foundations, where workers are paid with state money, grants, venture capital, etc.
As I have often noted here, Immanuel Wallerstein listed the systemic reasons why labor overhead costs will continue to rise even as wages stagnate. This means employers see total labor costs rising even if wages go nowhere: it gets more and more expensive to hire workers.
Then there's the staggering burden of liability in a litigious society, the costs of training and supervising ill-prepared employees and the hard-to-calculate costs of increasingly complex regulations.
5. We can solve the decline of the traditional work model with more education.This is also wishful thinking, as not only is higher education failing to produce workers with the requisite range of skills, the emphasis on higher education has produced an over-supply of people with college diplomas.
In the real world, even wages of the most highly educated are stagnating.
The structural changes in the world of work are visible in these charts:
The civilian participation rate is plummeting, despite the "recovery:"
The civilian participation rate for men is in a multi-decade decline:
Part-time jobs do not provide enough income to have an independent household or raise a family, nor do they pay enough taxes to fund the Savior State. The only jobs that count are full-time jobs, and they haven't even returned to 2007 levels despite a higher GDP and a rising population.
As a percentage of GDP, wages have been declining for decades.
Self-employment is the wellspring of entrepreneurs and small business. As you can see, it has also been declining for decades.
Of related interest:
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.my/2015/12/the-world-of-work-has-changed-and-its.html
That said, I share this blog by Charles Hugh Smith which is food for thought with regards the information and services economy.
In it, he debunks many of the myths promoted by those paperback writers who contributed so much to the techno-politico-socio-economo-utopian mythology surrounding computing and information technology.
It's great to see that more people are speaking up about what I have been ranting about for years against the all the media spin by the industry's boosters.
Hopefully, more national decision makers, including government ministers, will take cognisance of this and not be fooled by the hype, hoohah, bullshit and ballyhoo of the disinformation technology industry.
Charles Hugh Smith's article follows below.
Cheers
Yours truly
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.my/
=========================
The World of Work Has Changed, and It's Never Going Back to the "Good Old Days
Wishful thinking is not a solution.
The world of work has changed, and the rate of change is increasing. Despite the hopes of those who want to turn back the clock to the golden era of high-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs and an abundance of secure service-sector white collar jobs, history doesn't have a reverse gear (tm).
Those hoping for history to reverse gears place their faith in these wishful-thinking fantasies:
1. That automation will create more jobs than it destroys because that's what happened in the 1st and 2nd Industrial Revolutions. The wishful thinkers expect the Digital / 3rd Industrial Revolution to follow suite, but it won't: previous technological revolutions generated tens of millions of new low-skill jobs to replace the low-skill jobs that were lost to technology.
Millions of farm laborers moved to the factory floor in the 1st Industrial Revolution, and then millions of displaced factory workers moved to sales and clerk jobs in the 2nd Industrial Revolution.
Even white-collar jobs that supposedly required a college degree could be learned in a matter of hours, days or at most weeks, and little effort was required to stay current.
The Digital/3rd Industrial Revolution is not creating tens of millions of low-skill jobs, and it never will. Even worse for the wishful thinking crowd, the 3rd Digital Revolution is eating tech jobs along with the full spectrum of service-sector jobs.
Those expecting to replace low-skill service jobs with armies of coders will be disappointed, because coding is itself being automated.
The new jobs that are being created are few in number and highly demanding.Jobs are no longer strictly traditional boss-employee; the real growth is in peer-to-peer collaboration and what I term hybrid work performed by Mobile Creatives, workers with highly developed technical/creative/social skillsets who are comfortable working with rapidly changing technologies, who enjoy constant learning and are highly adaptive.
The work that is being created in the Digital/3rd Industrial Revolution is contingent and thus insecure. The only security that is attainable in fast-changing environments is the security offered by broad-based skillsets, great adaptability, a voracious appetite for new learning and a keenly developed set of "soft skills": communication, collaboration, self-management, etc.
The problem is the number of these jobs is far smaller than the number of jobs that will be eaten by software, AI and robotics. the number of workers who can transition productively to this far more demanding and insecure work environment is also much smaller than the workforce displaced by software/robotics.
In short, we need a new system; wishful thinking isn't a solution.
2. That the U.S. can unilaterally demand the right to export its goods and services to others at full price while refusing to accept competing imports. In effect, the fantasy is to return to 1955, when the U.S. could export goods at full pop to the allies who were rebuilding their war-shattered economies. Imports were few because those economies were busy focusing on their own domestic needs.
Trade is a two-way street. Fair trade is a moving target, depending on which side of the trade you happen to be on. Everybody wants to export their surplus at top prices, but competition lowers prices and profits. This forces global corporations to seek cost advantages by lowering the cost of components and labor.
3. The wishful thinkers want strong corporate profits to prop up their stock market and pension funds, but they don't want corporations to do what is necessary to reap strong profits, i.e. move production of commoditized goods and services overseas or replace human labor with cheaper automation.
You can't have it both ways.
Wishful thinkers choose to ignore the reality that roughly half of all U.S. based global corporate sales and profits are reaped overseas. It makes zero financial sense to pay a U.S. worker $20/hour, and pay the insanely expensive costs of sickcare/"healthcare" in the U.S. when the work can be done closer to the actual markets for the goods and services at a fraction of the cost.
Memo to all the armchair wishful thinkers: if you want to compete globally with a high-cost U.S. work force and no automation, be my guest. Put your own money and time at risk and go make it happen. Go hire people at top dollar and provide full benefits, and then go out and make big profits in the global marketplace.
The armchair pundits and ivory tower academics would quickly lose their shirts and come back broke. That's why they wouldn't dare risk their own security, capital and time doing what they demand of others.
4. The wishful thinkers decry the lack of "good-paying" jobs yet they refuse to look at the reasons why employing people in the traditional boss/employee hierarchy no longer makes sense. The armchair pundits and ivory tower academics have never hired even one person with their own money. These protected privileged are living in a fantasy-world of academia, think tanks and foundations, where workers are paid with state money, grants, venture capital, etc.
As I have often noted here, Immanuel Wallerstein listed the systemic reasons why labor overhead costs will continue to rise even as wages stagnate. This means employers see total labor costs rising even if wages go nowhere: it gets more and more expensive to hire workers.
Then there's the staggering burden of liability in a litigious society, the costs of training and supervising ill-prepared employees and the hard-to-calculate costs of increasingly complex regulations.
5. We can solve the decline of the traditional work model with more education.This is also wishful thinking, as not only is higher education failing to produce workers with the requisite range of skills, the emphasis on higher education has produced an over-supply of people with college diplomas.
In the real world, even wages of the most highly educated are stagnating.
The structural changes in the world of work are visible in these charts:The civilian participation rate is plummeting, despite the "recovery:"
The civilian participation rate for men is in a multi-decade decline:Part-time jobs do not provide enough income to have an independent household or raise a family, nor do they pay enough taxes to fund the Savior State. The only jobs that count are full-time jobs, and they haven't even returned to 2007 levels despite a higher GDP and a rising population.As a percentage of GDP, wages have been declining for decades.Self-employment is the wellspring of entrepreneurs and small business. As you can see, it has also been declining for decades.Of related interest:http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.my/2015/12/the-world-of-work-has-changed-and-its.html
22 October 2015
Teachers' union says 1BestariNet useless for online learning from home
The Free Malaysia Today article which follows at the end of my commentary bears the title - "Teachers scoff at 'advice' to use 1BestariNet".
But first some background on 1BestariNet.
In late 2012 I covered the Champion School Conference 2012 where FrogAsia, a YTL owned company showcased its Frog Virtual Learning Environment (Frog VLE) for students to use to learn online, access online libraries and educational resources, access Google learning content and Google's online utilities such as Google Apps, Google Calendar, Google Maps, for teachers to assign students their homework online, for students to do their homework and submit it online, for teachers to interact with students online, monitor their progress and intervened when necessary, for students to interact and collaborate with each other on assignment projects online using social networking facilities, for teachers interact with the parents online, for parents to check up on their children's progress online and so forth.
Students and teachers can access the Frog VLE system from anywhere on any device, including a desktop PC, notebook PC, netbook, tablet or smartphone which has a connection to the Internet.
The term "Champion Schools" was the name given to selected schools participating in the 1BestariNet pilot project.
The Frog VLE goes along with the Yes 4G WiMAX wireless broadband connectivity provided by YTL subsidiary YTL Communications to the over 10,000 schools across Malaysia, with speeds per school ranging from 2Mbps to 10Mbps in urban areas and from 2Mbps to 4Mbps in rural areas.
In May 2010, YTL Communications formally announced that it had received the contract from the Ministry of Education to implement the first phase of 1BestariNet connect up all schools. The contract was worth RM1.5 billion over the subsequent five years and that sum includes RM663 million to connect up all the schools with Yes 4G WiMAX wireless broadband. Altogether, 1BestariNet is a 15 year project costing over RM4 billion.
Cooked up by the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) of the Prime Minister's Department, 1BestariNet replaces the Ministry's failed SchoolNet project launched in 2004.
Billy Downie, head teacher at The Streely Academy told Champion Schools Conference 2012 that Frog VLE had helped his school rise from the bottom 1% of U.K. schools for student progress in 2003 to the top 5% in 2012.
The Streetly Academy is a state secondary school in Sutton Coldfield, an affluent middle-class suburb of Birmingham, West Midlands and its 1,400 students comprise 60% from mostly affluent households and 30% from least affluent households.
Behaviour at the school was bad, its reputation poor, few parents wanted to send their children there and it had five different head teachers on five years, and In 2005, the U.K. Office for Standards in Education (Ofstead) had rated Streetly as unsatisfactory.
Downie became head teacher there in 2010. When he joined, Streetly was still a comprehensive school within the U.K. system and one of the first things he did was to implement Frog VLE which greatly helped to facilitate the school's improvement efforts which drew upon the an experience from U.K. Sport, the U.K.'s government agency in charge of national sports development.
Downie basically adopted U.K. Sport's "continuous development in gradual steps" approach at Streetly and it paid off.
Frog VLE was developed by Frog Trade, a Halifax, U.K. based internet service and learning management systems provider and at the time was use by 700 schools in the U.K. On 15 June, 2012, YTL subsidiary YTL Education raised its equity in Frog Trade by 37.3% to a total of around 57.6%, thus becoming a majority shareholder, hence Frog Trade became a YTL company.
In his keynote speech, YTL Education chairman Lord Stewart Sutherland congratulated Malaysia for for implementing Frog VLE so widely across Malaysian schools.
“Governments and business must know how to use this creative technology to change the nature of education and I congratulate Malaysia for her initiatives in technology in education and 1BestariNet is an single, end-to-end virtual learning environment, unlike in the U.K. where implementation is fragmented, with no possibility of being interconnected into a single system,” Lord Stewart said. “A good teacher wants to know about their students and their needs and teachers today must be IT-literate and not have to rely of the technician, while parents can become a part of the school by knowing about their children's homework assignments and they can interact with teachers and the school,” the British Lord said.
This guy sure has impressive credentials, with it said that he is the U.K.'s leading academic in the management of education, with over 30 years experience. He also was principal of Kings College London, vice-chancellor of the University of London and Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, and vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Edinburgh, and now an advisor to the U.K. government on educational matters.
En. Sukimin Juki, headmaster of Taman Putra Perdana National School, a primary school in Sepang strongly believes in the use of technology in classrooms to enhance teaching and learning. As head of one of a Champion School, he played a leading role in initiatives to educate and raise awareness amongst parents about the value and benefits of Frog VLE for their children. Taman Putra Perdana school has 1,796 students, 128 teachers and 10 non-academic staff and besides Frog VLE, it also has MyGFL and the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation Planning Unit's (MAMPU's) learning management system.
“We want to turn our students into valuable assets and to make teaching a desirable profession and our teachers work with parents to achieve this,” said Sukimin.
“Since most students don't have computers at home, they were going to cybercafes, where they are exposed to unhealthy influences, so besides our computer labs, we provided computers in public areas within the school for them to use,” he added.
Now that last statement which I have highlighted in blue reveals a major deficiency in Malaysia, especially when Sepang, where Taman Putra Perdana school is located is within or close to the Multimedia Super Corridor (now called MSC Malaysia), that 15km x 50km areas of land between the Petronas Twin Towers, the administrative capital Putrajaya, the township of Cyberjaya which is intended to be the centre of development of Malaysia's information technology and multimedia industry and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport which is in Sepang itself.
For a learning system like Frog VLE to be able to fully benefit students, teachers and parents, it requires that most students, teachers and parents have ready access to a PC, tablet or smartphone as well as access to stable and affordable broadband connectivity and if most of Taman Putra Perdana's students do not have a computer at home and have to go to cybercafes to access Frog VLE because there are not enough computers at their school, then what more students and teachers of schools in other towns and villages across Malaysia?
Sure, Frog VLE may work very well in an affluent area of the U.K. such as Sutton Coldfield where one would expect most students to be running around with notebooks, tablets and smartohones, and Billy Downie told me on the sidelines of the conference, that even the poorest of students at his school at least had a computer with Internet access at home.
However, how many school students across Malaysia have a PC with Internet access at home, let alone can afford to run around with a notebook, tablet or smartphone and more importantly afford the cost of broadband Internet access on the go.
From my own experience amongst real people on the ground, many lower income urban people may be able to afford especially a lower end model smartphone but quite often have exceeded their monthly cellular data quota, so are rather limited in their access to social media and other online facilities such as Frog VLE.
From my own experience amongst real people on the ground, many lower income urban people may be able to afford especially a lower end model smartphone but quite often have exceeded their monthly cellular data quota, so are rather limited in their access to social media and other online facilities such as Frog VLE.
Also, imagine five children having to share one PC with Internet connection at home and having to take turns to do their homework on that one PC.
I know of a low-income family in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur which received a 1Malaysia Netbook and a loaned desktop PC which is shared amongst four school going children. They could not afford fibre broadband access so opted for cellular wireless instead and with the children accessing social media, posting and downloading pictures, videos and so forth apart from accessing Frog VLE, they soon exceeded the monthly quota well before the end of the monthly billing period and had to pay to extend their quota and eventually their mother could not take it any more and terminated the broadband, so the children had computers but no Internet access at home.
One day, the eldest boy, a teenager when to a friend's house to use her PC supposedly to access Frog VLE but my friend told me that she found him busily accessing Facebook instead.
In November 2014, the media were screaming sensationally about YTL Communications being fined RM2.4 million by the Ministry of Education for failing to connect up 1,003 of the 10,000 schools with Yes 4G WiMAX wireless broadband within the two and a half years or 30 months time period. As necessitated that the Ministry get other telecommunications companies to connect up those remaining unconnected schools.
However this was not the fault of YTL Communications but of the the local authorities in the areas concerned who were slow to approve the construction of necessary infrastructure such as radio towers and the Ministry of Education is aware of this, as The Star reported below.
"Delays by local authorities and state governments are the reason why a two and a half year objective to implement the 1BestariNet project in 10,000 schools nationwide failed, said the Education Ministry."
"It said the authorities and states were slow in approving the construction permits for towers in specific locations, needed by the RM4bil project aimed at providing 4G broadband connectivity and virtual learning environment (VLE) to the schools."
To me, YTL Communications did pretty well to connect up close to 90% of schools, which would score it an A in any school examination or test. Whilst most of the media screamed about about YTL Communications being fined, they tended to either ignore or downplay the much bigger failure which would amount to an "F minus, minus, minus" in a school exam.
Further down the same article The Star reports"-
"According to the A-G’s report, the project was implemented before teachers and students were fully trained to utilise VLE."
“(As a result) VLE use by teachers, students and parents was very low – between 0.01% and 4.69%”, it said."
"It also stated that proper school requirement studies were not conducted before the broadband system was installed."
"The ministry explained that the contract specified that such a study should be carried out but this was not done by the contractors at all the schools."
“The contractors conducted a school requirement study on 430 of 1,600 schools that have a local area network (LAN)."
“Of the remaining 8,289 schools that did not have a LAN, the contractors only conducted a study on 2,865 of these."
“Subsequently, we only received 430 written reports on this,” the ministry said, adding that YTL has been instructed to fulfil this obligation in the interim period."
So between 0.01% to 4.69% of teachers, students and parents use Frog VLE, which is pretty horrible, and it looks like they are on another planet from the Streetly Academy in Sutton Coldfield.
Now the article above talks about broadband connectivity and access to Frog VLE in schools but how about access to Frog VLE at home or when away from school?
Right now, Malaysia is blanketed by an unhealthy haze due to smoke from the burning of vegetation in Indonesia being carried over to Malaysia and Singapore by the prevailing winds.
As a precaution to protect the health of students, thousands of schools across Malaysia have had to close and the Ministry of Education has advised teachers to teach students at home online through 1BestariNet.
However, the Secretary-General of the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) protested that "the advice was not practical as teachers most often were unable to log on to the online programme, much less use it for teaching purposes", according to the Free Malaysia Today report below.
I'll leave you to read Free Malaysia Today's article in full below.
======================
Teachers scoff at ‘advice’ to use 1BestariNet
FMT Reporters | October 22, 2015
NUTP secretary-general says teachers cannot even log-on to the online teaching aid much less use it to teach students when schools are shut due to the haze.
KUALA LUMPUR: Teachers are rolling their eyes at the advice they received from the Ministry of Education that they use 1BestariNet to teach students missing school due to the worsening haze.
Education Ministry director-general Khair Mohamad Yusof had said yesterday that while schools remained shut, teachers could use the time to give students homework online.
Khair said it was not to be taken as an “instruction” from him, merely advice, considering some students were sitting for important public examinations in the weeks ahead.
Commenting on this however, secretary-general of the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) Lok Yim Pheng, said the advice was not practical as teachers most often were unable to log on to the online programme, much less use it for teaching purposes.
“How can we expect teachers to liaise online with students when they can’t even access 1BestariNet in schools,” she was quoted by Malay Mail Online as saying.
10,149 schools supposedly have access to 1BestariNet, a virtual learning initiative by the Education Ministry and its corporate partners, who developed the online programme as a learning tool.
Earlier yesterday, when speaking to reporters at the national level Smart School Award at Persiaran Bukit Kiara here, Khair reminded students not to view the current closure of schools as school holidays.
He said the ministry would also be looking into long-term solutions on how to deal with the closure of schools due to the haze as they had no current standard operating procedure on it.
He also said there was no need for students to attend replacement classes to make up for the current closure of schools.
=======================
Now that is exactly the point - i.e. 1BestariNet is inaccessible, especially from most homes and even within schools.
Malaysians have a rather cynical nickname for Malaysia - i.e. "Bolehland" of "Anything Can Land" and Bolehland is famous for such grandiose and much hyped projects such as 1BestariNet.
Anyway, I saw this coming three years ago and can proudly say - I told you so!.
Unfortunately, Malaysian policy makers don't seem to be able to think about whether something which works well in especially a highly developed country, will work equally well when transplanted lock, stock and barrel into a very different context in Malaysia in terms of availability, extensiveness and affordability of adequate communications infrastructure and facilities, the affordability of user access devices and of broadband Internet connectivity, the level of computer literacy and tech savviness and so forth.
Instead of cutting and pasting from the advanced countries to Malaysia, such decision makers should think of ways to implement Internet connectivity and electronic learning most appropriately to prevailing, real-world, local conditions in Malaysia.
The key activity here is to teach students effectively and if a teacher teaching in front of a class works best within prevailing conditions and circumstances, then so be it.
If a country does not have the means and material resources to enable a learning management system like Frog VLE to be used optimally, then do not try to keep up with the Jones in the west and fail, since that will negatively impact especially the innocent students.
As one who has written about the information and communications technology industry in Malaysia for about 20 years, I have encountered so much crap like this in the ICT industry, especially the Internet and new media industries, as well as by the IT media and ICT industry boosters, furturists, CON-sultants and spin doctors.
Phase 1 of 1BestariNet implementation should end in May 2017 and a new contractor will be awarded the contract to implement Phase 2 of an already moribund and floundering project and we'll be bombarded with more hype, hoohah, bullshit and ballyhoo about how Phase 2 will magically "solve all the problems of Phase 1 and Malaysian schools will attain a Shangri-La of educational excellence".
And that is why I have bestowed upon myself the psuedonym "IT.Scheiss" which means "IT Shit" in English.
No. I am not scheiss, the technology is not the scheiss but the marketing hype, hoohah, bullshit and ballyhoo is, and 1BestariNet is a perfect case of IT.Scheiss.
I am yours truly
IT.SCHEISS
13 October 2015
WORRYING ABOUT THE FUTURE OF MALAYSIA
Last Sunday afternoon, a friend said he is concerned about the future of the younger generation, especially over their desire for instant gratification and an unwillingness to strive to learn and improve themselves.
He was appalled at how even babies of four are addicted to their smartphone, even before they can read or write.
He teaches private tuition part time and gets frustrated with how his young student won't even do his homework, until he has to sit him down and make him do his homework in front of his parents.
That evening I had tea with an old friend in his mid 60s who still installs and services industrial compressors for a living.
A former military man and former oil rig worker, I will not repeat the stream of f%&* words which pepper his speech.
He works for a compressor reseller and travels around the country installing and servicing compressors installed at various industrial and other facilities across the country and has many stories to tell about industrial plants scaling down or closing down their operations in Malaysia and shift to neighbouring countries. Well, those are topics for another post.
More to the point here, "The Colonel" as we refer to him described how he had to attend to a compressor problem soon after its last scheduled maintenance and found that its filters had not been cleaned and gave it properly to his management when he got back to the office.
"When I and my older colleague used to service these compressors, there rarely were maintenance calls between scheduled maintenance times. Nowadays, the directors give jobs to their children, nephews, uncles, aunties, rather tan employ competent people from the open market, and when I told the directors that to their faces, they just hung their heads", The Colonel said.
"These new staff today are good at burying their faces in their telephones but they otherwise know chickenshit", The Colonel added.
Well, I do not know what the three of us can do to change the current situation or of the upcoming generation, which knows Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and their smartphones backward but don't even know how to change a light bulb, wire up a 13A plug or jump start a car.
However, civilisations and empires rise and fall, as happened to Rome which rose to its heights, then declined as Romans got lazy and reliant on the slaves from across their empire to do all the work, whilst Rome declined into hedonistic decadence, and the Roman elite indulged themselves in days long banquets, where ate and drank, then induced themselves to vomit so that they could eat and drink more.
Some time back, an independent minded, pro-UMNO blogger predicted that things continue the way they are going now, Malaysians will be working as maids in Indonesia 20 years from now.
And, the Prime Minister continues to sing that well worn mantra about Malaysia being a "high income" nation by the year 2020.
"High income nation" indeed, when given the current inflation rate, RM4,000 per month gross national income per capita would buy less in 2020 than RM2,000 bought in 2010.
Below are two slides extracted from the Prime Minister's presentation of the Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) Roadmap on the 25th of October 2010.
Look at the slides below and ask yourself what you think will be the real purchasing power of the ringgit in the year 2020 compared to 2010.
Note that RM48,000 is an annual income which is RM4,000 per month.
Readers should note that the inflation rate announced by the government is the average inflation rate across all of Malaysia.
The inflation rate is based upon the prices of 200 essential goods and services, so inflation would be lower than the average in a remote small town or village where rentals, property prices and the cost of food and other items grown or produced in the area are low. On the other hand, it is much higher than the average in highly urban areas such as the Klang Valley, where financial experts estimate the real inflation rate to be around 5.5% to 6% or perhaps even more now.
So ask yourselves how much will RM4,000 per month buy you in the Klang Valley in 2020?
Also note from the above chart that RM4.000 per month is the in the upper part of the middle income bracket, so there will be lots more people earning less than that but will still have to pay the same higher prices for goods and services.
In fact, the chart above tells you that there will be 7 million low income jobs in 2020, 7.4 million middle income jobs and a mere 1.8 million high income jobs in 2020, so what "high income nation" is the Prime Minister talking about?
Attached please find the full PDF of the ETP Roadmap Launch by the Prime Minister which was downloaded much earlier from the Performance Management Delivery Unit's (Pemandu's) website.
Readers can also download details on the ETP, including the full programme book from PEMANDU's website, though the attached presentation appears to no longer be there.
http://etp.pemandu.gov.my/download_centre.aspx
My friend is right to be concerned about the future of Malaysia upcoming generation - lost in the world of WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The Malay term for "virtual world" is "dunia maya". Well "maya" is adopted from Sanskrit where it means "illusion" or "magic".
Well yes, illusion is what the cyber world and cyber culture are all about.
Yours truly
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.com
He was appalled at how even babies of four are addicted to their smartphone, even before they can read or write.
He teaches private tuition part time and gets frustrated with how his young student won't even do his homework, until he has to sit him down and make him do his homework in front of his parents.
That evening I had tea with an old friend in his mid 60s who still installs and services industrial compressors for a living.
A former military man and former oil rig worker, I will not repeat the stream of f%&* words which pepper his speech.
He works for a compressor reseller and travels around the country installing and servicing compressors installed at various industrial and other facilities across the country and has many stories to tell about industrial plants scaling down or closing down their operations in Malaysia and shift to neighbouring countries. Well, those are topics for another post.
More to the point here, "The Colonel" as we refer to him described how he had to attend to a compressor problem soon after its last scheduled maintenance and found that its filters had not been cleaned and gave it properly to his management when he got back to the office.
"When I and my older colleague used to service these compressors, there rarely were maintenance calls between scheduled maintenance times. Nowadays, the directors give jobs to their children, nephews, uncles, aunties, rather tan employ competent people from the open market, and when I told the directors that to their faces, they just hung their heads", The Colonel said.
"These new staff today are good at burying their faces in their telephones but they otherwise know chickenshit", The Colonel added.
Well, I do not know what the three of us can do to change the current situation or of the upcoming generation, which knows Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and their smartphones backward but don't even know how to change a light bulb, wire up a 13A plug or jump start a car.
However, civilisations and empires rise and fall, as happened to Rome which rose to its heights, then declined as Romans got lazy and reliant on the slaves from across their empire to do all the work, whilst Rome declined into hedonistic decadence, and the Roman elite indulged themselves in days long banquets, where ate and drank, then induced themselves to vomit so that they could eat and drink more.
Some time back, an independent minded, pro-UMNO blogger predicted that things continue the way they are going now, Malaysians will be working as maids in Indonesia 20 years from now.
And, the Prime Minister continues to sing that well worn mantra about Malaysia being a "high income" nation by the year 2020.
"High income nation" indeed, when given the current inflation rate, RM4,000 per month gross national income per capita would buy less in 2020 than RM2,000 bought in 2010.
Below are two slides extracted from the Prime Minister's presentation of the Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) Roadmap on the 25th of October 2010.
Look at the slides below and ask yourself what you think will be the real purchasing power of the ringgit in the year 2020 compared to 2010.
Note that RM48,000 is an annual income which is RM4,000 per month.
Readers should note that the inflation rate announced by the government is the average inflation rate across all of Malaysia.
The inflation rate is based upon the prices of 200 essential goods and services, so inflation would be lower than the average in a remote small town or village where rentals, property prices and the cost of food and other items grown or produced in the area are low. On the other hand, it is much higher than the average in highly urban areas such as the Klang Valley, where financial experts estimate the real inflation rate to be around 5.5% to 6% or perhaps even more now.
So ask yourselves how much will RM4,000 per month buy you in the Klang Valley in 2020?
Also note from the above chart that RM4.000 per month is the in the upper part of the middle income bracket, so there will be lots more people earning less than that but will still have to pay the same higher prices for goods and services.
In fact, the chart above tells you that there will be 7 million low income jobs in 2020, 7.4 million middle income jobs and a mere 1.8 million high income jobs in 2020, so what "high income nation" is the Prime Minister talking about?
Attached please find the full PDF of the ETP Roadmap Launch by the Prime Minister which was downloaded much earlier from the Performance Management Delivery Unit's (Pemandu's) website.
Readers can also download details on the ETP, including the full programme book from PEMANDU's website, though the attached presentation appears to no longer be there.
http://etp.pemandu.gov.my/download_centre.aspx
My friend is right to be concerned about the future of Malaysia upcoming generation - lost in the world of WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The Malay term for "virtual world" is "dunia maya". Well "maya" is adopted from Sanskrit where it means "illusion" or "magic".
Well yes, illusion is what the cyber world and cyber culture are all about.
Yours truly
IT.Scheiss
http://itsheiss.blogspot.com
16 September 2015
IF THE WORLD ENDS BY 30th SEPTEMBER, IT WAS GOOD KNOWING YOU
Well folks, it's the 15th of September 2015 and if the various doomsday predictions are right, the world should end sometime during the coming fortnight.
Patriot Newswire says:-
"The World Is Going To End On 13 September 2015 And This Is Why"
https://patriotnewswire.com/2014/12/the-world-is-going-to-end-on-13-september-2015-and-this-is-why/#
Well, nothing has happened yet and we're still here but it could be too soon to tell.
"The end of the world will happen on the 23rd of September 2015, well we'll know for sure in a weeks time."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wVI2gZslQ
The Pope will visit the White House on 23rd September, 2015 so something "terrible" will happen. Well, let's see in a weeks time.
"9 THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN IN SEPTEMBER 23 2015(CERN, POPE, OBAMA, ASTEROIDE)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVU40wlcsLg
That poster cannot even spell "asteroid" correctly. Says a lot about his or her level of education.
Hopefully the Pope will tell Obama to stop supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS which has resulted in refugees fleeing to Europe in droves but will Obama listen?
I guess that's the "terrible" thing which will happen, according to these conspiracy theorists with warped minds.
Well the 23d of September 2015 is the Autumn Equinox when the sun is directly above the equator and these conspiracy theorists and prophets of doom see something inauspicious or "satanic" about that.
Remember all the hoo hah about the world ending on the 21st of December 2012 when the Mayan Long Calendar ended?
Well the 21st of December 2012 came and went and we're still here.
Oh yes. The 21st of December 2012 was the Winter Solstice that year when the sun was directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, one of those supposedly occult dates.
The U.S. imperialist invasion of Iraq began on the Spring Equinox 2003, well surely there must be something occult and inauspicious about that.
After September turns into October, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will come up with some other impending catastrophe at some impending date, most probably on a solstice or an equinox.
Meanwhile Salam Aid Il Adha to all Muslims, Happy Deepavali to all Hindus, Merry Christmas to all Christians and Happy New Year 2016 to everyone and many more to come.
IT.Scheiss
Patriot Newswire says:-
"The World Is Going To End On 13 September 2015 And This Is Why"
https://patriotnewswire.com/2014/12/the-world-is-going-to-end-on-13-september-2015-and-this-is-why/#
Well, nothing has happened yet and we're still here but it could be too soon to tell.
"The end of the world will happen on the 23rd of September 2015, well we'll know for sure in a weeks time."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wVI2gZslQ
The Pope will visit the White House on 23rd September, 2015 so something "terrible" will happen. Well, let's see in a weeks time.
"9 THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN IN SEPTEMBER 23 2015(CERN, POPE, OBAMA, ASTEROIDE)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVU40wlcsLg
That poster cannot even spell "asteroid" correctly. Says a lot about his or her level of education.
Hopefully the Pope will tell Obama to stop supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS which has resulted in refugees fleeing to Europe in droves but will Obama listen?
I guess that's the "terrible" thing which will happen, according to these conspiracy theorists with warped minds.
Well the 23d of September 2015 is the Autumn Equinox when the sun is directly above the equator and these conspiracy theorists and prophets of doom see something inauspicious or "satanic" about that.
Remember all the hoo hah about the world ending on the 21st of December 2012 when the Mayan Long Calendar ended?
Well the 21st of December 2012 came and went and we're still here.
Oh yes. The 21st of December 2012 was the Winter Solstice that year when the sun was directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, one of those supposedly occult dates.
The U.S. imperialist invasion of Iraq began on the Spring Equinox 2003, well surely there must be something occult and inauspicious about that.
After September turns into October, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will come up with some other impending catastrophe at some impending date, most probably on a solstice or an equinox.
Meanwhile Salam Aid Il Adha to all Muslims, Happy Deepavali to all Hindus, Merry Christmas to all Christians and Happy New Year 2016 to everyone and many more to come.
IT.Scheiss
09 September 2015
NOW HAVEN'T I BEEN SAYING THIS ALL THESE YEARS?
Well, well, well! Now haven't I been saying this all these years against the torrent of bullshit from paperback writer futurists and the opportunistic, brain dead management CON-sultants who have been parroting the mantra that Malaysia can "move up the value chain" from manufacturing to information and services industries to become a "knowledge-based economy by the year 2020"?
For years, government ministers, civil servants and management types had been chanting the mantra that Malaysia's productivity has decline dangerously compared to our neighbours, so we "must move up the value chain" to more "highly skilled, knowledge intensive activities in high technology, knowledge-based industries".
Oh! how I squirm when I hear such obfuscating terms by spin doctors. Welcome to this new language called "Managementese".
Oh! how I squirm when I hear such obfuscating terms by spin doctors. Welcome to this new language called "Managementese".
That often made me wonder whether these guys did not know that productivity is measured in terms of output per worker per unit time or whether did they know but were lying through their teeth when they actually meant that Malaysia's labour had become expensive compared to our neighbours, hence "less productive".
Often in conversation over coffee or tea, people talk about how the economies of our neighbours such as Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia are rising whilst Malaysia's economy is in decline.
Well, what's been happening is that manufacturing and assembly industries have been moving out of Malaysia to these countries as well as to China.
And, now, a respected regional business publication the Nikkei Asian Review asks whether Malaysia is now paying for having downplayed manufacturing.
Of course yes - manufacturing has to move away from just screwdriver assembly to the design and development of unique, innovative and quality products and materials, rather than what we have now where many manufacturers just rebadge and rebrand generic products from China.
Anyway, I guess after this, there will be plenty of management CON-sultants scrambling to change their well worn script to one which champions manufacturing, now that Nikkei has debunked the notion of services as an "engine of growth to replace manufacturing".
BTW. I understand that shares of furniture manufacturers which export their products to the U.S., Europe and other developed countries are good investments now that the Malaysian ringgit is down at around RM4.30 to the U.S. dollar.
I rest my case.
Read on
IT.Scheiss
August 16, 2015 7:00 am JST Currency meltdown
Malaysia might pay for downplaying manufacturing
HIROSHI MURAYAMA, Nikkei senior staff writer
BANGKOK -- As emerging countries develop, they tend to shift their engine of growth from manufacturing to the service sector out of a belief that higher costs associated with growth erode manufacturers' export-competitiveness. But enhancing added value in services is no easy task, and putting manufacturing on the back burner can lead to stagnation.
For Malaysia, such a gloomy scenario might become a reality.
"I didn't know there used to be a factory here," a truck driver delivering rice to a nearby supermarket says, looking at a building construction site across the street. Chic houses line this neighborhood of Petaling Jaya, a city next to Kuala Lumpur in the state of Selangor.
A Panasonic group air conditioner factory stood at the site just several years ago. The property developer that acquired the site is now building a complex to house a shopping mall with office space on top. Similar projects are underway in many parts of the area.
Petaling Jaya was an industrial hub. But once an emerging country's per capita gross domestic product exceeds $5,000 or so, simple assembly is not enough to sustain growth. Malaysia's per capita GDP crossed the threshold back in 2005. Because manufacturers moved production to countries with late development and lower costs, growth in early-developing emerging countries slowed, plunging their economies into the doldrums.
As prime minister from 2003 to 2009, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi aimed to avoid this trap by shifting his country's focus from manufacturing to Islamic finance and other services. Growth was maintained, and ex-factory workers got jobs at malls and offices. Manufacturing's contribution to the economy fell from 31% in 2004 to 25% in 2013, according to the Japan External Trade Organization.
Malaysia maintained growth of at least 5% per annum almost every year, and the shift in its industrial structure apparently succeeded -- until the ongoing currency crash revealed worse-than-expected weakness. The ringgit lost 10-20% in the first half of 2015 year on year, but exports fell 3.1%. As domestic demand softens, the brakes have been put on foreign demand, making slower growth unavoidable.
A softer currency normally helps lift exports. But with Malaysia's manufacturing weakening, its cheaper currency is not leading to more exports. Having manufacturers that can ship goods abroad provides tolerance to a financial crisis. During the 1997 Asian currency crisis, the ringgit and Thailand's baht tumbled, triggering economic chaos. But the weaker currencies strengthened manufacturing's competitiveness, and exports helped bring about rapid economic recoveries, guiding the countries out of the crisis.
The situation was different in Argentina and elsewhere in South America, where a quick economic turnaround did not happen even after the currency dropped. Economic data explains this: Manufacturing accounted for 38% of Thailand's GDP in 2013 but just 13% in Argentina's. Malaysia's ability to weather a crisis is sure to erode if manufacturing's contribution there continues to shrink.
South Korea and Taiwan alone have escaped the pitfall of middle-income nations and boosted their economies to a level close to those of industrialized countries. Both have rising manufacturing ratios: South Korea's climbed from 24% in 2004 to 29% in 2013, while Taiwan's increased from 25% to 31%. That they did not focus too hard on the service sector, and enhanced production technologies, helped sustain their growth.
To increase a country's GDP, such services as real estate, finance and tourism might seem attractive as alternatives to manufacturing. But taking that route does not guarantee long-term growth, given that the service sector will face intense competition with developed economies. Going beyond simple assembly work is a key issue for not only Malaysia, but also other middle-income nations.
03 June 2015
I WEREN'T TOO POPULAR FOR TELLING THEM SO
Now what did I say about Cyberutopians in my blog post here on 17th or May, 2015?
Just to recap, back in the 1990s, starry eyed Cyberutopians touted the claim that the Internet would enable ordinary folks like you, me and a galaxy of startup companies to "challenge and defeat the power of governments and the dominance of monopolies" in "David versus Goliath" fashion.
They claimed that the Internet would create a level playing field where a small Internet business anywhere would have an equal presence in Cyberspace as the largest corporate and multinational giants.
Click to read My earlier post
Around 1995 I interviewed a starry-eyed Malaysian Cyberutopian resident in Perth, Australia who gave me a press release quoting a fellow starry-eyed Cyberutopian who waxed ecstatic about how the Internet "would enable the best people to flee corporations for free agency in Cyberspace", leaving corporations with the mediocre staff, ultimately resulting in their downfall.
Dunno what that guy was smoking but it must have been pretty strong. Anyway, that's the kind of crap (or "scheiss") I have repeatedly heard so many times before.
Well today, about 20 years later, it has turned out that some of those Internet startups have metamorphosised into giant Internet corporations upon which many Internet startups and small businesses are dependent upon for their survival and it is a handful of these new global giants who are causing governments to be concerned over their monopoly power as revealed by the Reuters report below as carried by The Star.
==========================
German vice chancellor worried about market power of Internet giants
BERLIN: German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said he was worried the market power of firms like Google was hurting competition on the Internet.
Gabriel, who is also economy minister, has repeatedly voiced concern about the dominance of US software companies and last year suggested firms like Google should be broken up if they abuse dominant market positions.
"How can it be that in order to have Google's (mobile operating system) Android you need to pre-install Google Search, Google Browser, Google Mail, Google You-Tube and its app store on the device?" Gabriel said at an event in Berlin.
He welcomed a decision by the European Commission in April to launch an antitrust investigation into Google's Android system over concerns anti-competitive constraints imposed by the company were hampering markets.
Gabriel said agreements needed to be reviewed to ensure that customers were not being barred from using competing browsers and web services and locked into "Google Internet".
Market power should not just refer to individual services but should also be assessed according to the value chain on the Internet, he added.
In Germany, fears of digital domination by firms like Google are linked with wider concerns of US cyber espionage since the revelations in 2013 of mass US surveillance on German citizens.
A report published on Monday by the Monopolies Commission, which advises the government, advised against the need for special regulation regarding the provision of Internet search and instead recommended adjusting existing competition law. — Reuters
========================
The German Vice Chancellor's statement above brings to mind how people used to accuse Microsoft of abuse of its dominant market power with its Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer Web browser on desktop PCs but today Google holds much more dominance on Android phones and tablets and on the Internet as well, such as this free Blogger blog site which is provided by Google.
Information is power those who own and control the gateways to information have ultimate power to shape our understanding and perception of our world.
Anyway, chic and trendy as they were, I never bought into those Cyberutopian myths and illusions.
IT.Scheiss
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