Tubular Steel Chair

I was in Germany for a while this winter break and I spent half a day at Bauhaus Archives. It was a really interesting museum that traced the history of the Bauhaus school and it's 'radicalism' in arts and design. The conception of Bauhaus as a school that would marry arts with craftsmanship was a really powerful idea to me personally. In essence it seek to put together fine arts and applied arts as well as the socio-economic value of them.

I looked at how some of the course components of Bauhaus focused on perfecting the skills and crafts of students while getting them to think about the appropriate materials and techniques involved in the production of things they designed. In many sense, I see a lot of Bauhaus sort of ideas in IKEA - design oriented towards functionality and serving the needs of people (including low costs). Perhaps there's always a business element in the whole Bauhaus movement - in any case, we want to believe that business exists to serve the greater interests of the society.

Equally important in the Bauhaus movement was the idea of 'total arts and design', where all different forms of arts and design were explored, architecture, photography, metal works, pottery, weaving - including the combination of these different products. The potential of such a school combined with industry haven't seemed to be explored again after the closure of Bauhaus - at least not in my knowledge. I'd love to see the movement spring to life again and not just be a relic of the past where we can only reminiscent on the impact it has brought to design in the modern world.

Love hating it.

If you've been a long-time user of the resources on ERPZ or been reading the pile of this articles written every now and then, you'd know the guy behind most of the stuff here. It's Kevin, yea that's me. But perhaps it's also time to know that this website is hosting on Siteground and ERPZ have been with them since 2007, the year I finished A Levels. I only properly got started with supplying academic resources subsequently.

Anyways this post is part of the little contest that Siteground has organized for Thanksgiving to share our experience/impression of Siteground with the world. For me, I guess it's also to give thanks to this company for making it possible for me to share these stuff to the students out there who are motivated, driven and interested to make good of their studies and future lives.

Siteground and I share a really love-hate relationship. When I first started it, I switched from a host that used H-Sphere and I thought C-Panel was a really difficult control system to use. But I loved their prices and the fact that there was no restrictions on space, FTPs, databases and such (during those days it wasn't that common). Geeks out there will know that and Siteground was probably one of the more competitive companies that started slashing these restrictions and others followed suit.

I hate the way Siteground locks me in and then starts raising the full year hosting prices bit by bit (at least every time I need to renew my contract), and I hate the way they hold my Credit Card information hostage and I can't delete them from my account so unless I explicitly make them terminate the hosting, they'll debit sums from my Credit Card month by month to pay for further hosting. But I loved the fact that when I run into trouble and send a ticket to the support team, I get replies that shows that they care, though more often than not, it takes quite some effort to find a means of getting to the ticket submission. Quite a few times, Chinese characters stopped showing up on some of my pages though there was no issue with my character encoding and scripting. I managed to get them to check it up and after a thorough look through they fixed the problem for me.

Siteground do care for their customers even though they use extremely competitive pricing techniques (US$9.95/yr hosting for your friends who join us! But service renewal for yourself? US$108/yr). Once I got pretty frustrated and decided to cancel my hosting because I've been forking out these payments on my own and generating zero income from the website and yet the host is always driving up the prices. I asked to cancel my hosting but thankfully for the readers of ERPZ, Siteground negotiated a special price with me upon discovering that I want to cancel the hosting. I'll need your continuous support in terms of referring friends to your site and making my costs worth it. Everyone I reach out to makes me feel that my expenses on this site is worth it.

That's my story with Siteground. They are an aggressive, very competitive company offering web-hosting and an array of other web solutions. They do a good job for me thus far and I must say that for all my complains about their pricing and deals for existing customers, they're fine. So do approach them (through me, it's like a super awesome deal) if you want to start a website. You might be elated to enjoy a good deal, often taking for granted when their service is smooth and running well, and sometimes secretly believing you're smart because you're with them. Some other times, you cope with difficulties with the hosting, you get disappointed by them or angry with them for trying to rip you off. This is life with Siteground, it's like living in the rest of reality - you wrestle, fight, laugh and then, you both become good friends in the end.

In the Population in Brief 2011 (pity I didn't have such a reference material during those days when I was working on the research), it seems that fertility in Singapore has fallen even further but it seem to have stopped being such a big deal as the government internalized the social message at large, 'don't bother us with this matter'. There's even a line that says, "We recognise that getting married and starting families are personal choices and decisions." And in a typical Singapore-style bossiness that cannot tolerate inaction or lack of response to something deemed unsocial, it went on, "The Government aims to create a pro- family environment, through a comprehensive set of measures, including the Baby Bonus cash gift and co-savings, tax reliefs and rebates, as well as child care subsidies."

Up, up, up more slowly now...

In the latest LSE100 module which I recently completed, we explored the question, 'Is Population Growth a good thing?'. I was thrown back into a world I was familiar with from research and study of Human Geography back in High School. The Demographic Transition Model, Pro- and anti-natal policies, the 'development as a contraception' argument and so on. It was both interesting and somewhat annoying that themes in the discipline hasn't quite changed much. I guess the discipline is in itself shaped by the themes so I can't expect too much. But to consider population growth over a longer period and look at its dynamics from the perspective of the development of the human civilization and forward is interesting especially when you add technology, resource constraints and the notion of ideas into play.

And of course, more dramatically, the world just crossed a new milestone of having 7 billion people in the world - I remembered that the 6 billion mark was crossed some time in late 1999; my Geography teacher used so say that she and her geography class got the chance to watch the countdown (or count-up?) to 6 billion. More so than ever, we're all just another tiny soul wandering around the increasing crowded surface of our planet.

While 98% of people get a bit more satisfaction out of life (but not a lot) when their incomes rise, the remaining 2% are known as "frustrated achievers" — more money only makes them more unhappy, according to a team led by Leonardo Becchetti of the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy. Studying data on UK households, the researchers found that 70% of the frustrated achievers are female, and divorce is more common among this group than among the rest of the population.

Which brings me to the interesting idea explored in a public lecture in LSE last month; two professors 'debate' on the validity of using happiness as a measure of social progress rather than the 'traditional' indicators of income-measurements and development figures (mortality, access to services, nutrition, etc).

Indeed, happiness might often be relative and too often depends on context and circumstances. Our method of asking people if they are happy is as good as trying to measure the wealth of economy by randomly selecting people on the streets and then noting the amount of cash in their wallets. Too much of data relating to happiness is being missed out in the way it is captured now, making it difficult for happiness to be a measure of social progress though ideally, it actually serves as a good benchmark.

During my course on Microfinance (organized by The Student Initiative), I wrote an essay to conclude the course. It discusses the development of microfinance briefly and focused on the idea of expanding savings in the whole social enterprise of Microfinance. I covered the issue of financing of these enterprises and addressed the question of the future direction of the industry. It was interesting how this intellectual view connected with my personal experience on the ground when I went to Ghana.

Personal savings facilities did have a latent demand there. Previous experiences with micro-credit hasn't always been positive for the folks and they hope to reverse the financial equation and accumulate for investment rather than borrow to invest. These made sense to a certain extent: their proximity to poverty and sometimes subsistence lifestyle means that their access to money was limited; this made it difficult for them to repay loans when their investments pays them off in terms of crops and livestock that may not be readily liquidated (owing to price fluctuations in the market that may be in conflict with the repayment cycles). Accumulating savings and subsequently investing savings meant that there was less pressure trying to convert the non-monetary wealth back to money.

At Ekumfi-Ekotsi, where our brigade served, we designed a simple banking operation that the folks from the community can implement to accumulate savings to provide small, community-based loans as well as generate returns to finance community development projects. The focus was on savings and the incentives that these folks have for savings. We wanted to make the system simple for them to quickly see the benefits and save effectively. Our Microfinance Brigade even has a website set up on future recommendations for the brigades serving at the particular village. It included a report we've written to guide the future development of the fund. On the day before we left, there was 6 accounts set up with the fund and approximately 50 Cedis saved.

It was thus amazing that we later learnt that the number of savers went up to 200 when the next LSE brigade went down. They made it drastically easier for people to set up accounts by subsidizing the costs of passport-sized photographs required for account opening. And many more little workshops and marketing to promote the importance of savings. I attended the Global Brigades Student Leader Conference for Europe just last week and met a member of the brigade who was last serving at the community in late September - approximately 3 months after we left. The description of our projects progress was amazing; the folks at Ekotsi have almost internalized the idea of saving and using the fund as if that had been part of their lives all the while. There's now 350 savers and they garnered sufficient funds to start making loans.

I didn't get the chance to fully understand the current operations but the new savings products which I recommended did get implemented (way before the timeline I've laid down); as a matter of fact, the brigades had to move fast the execute ideas because there will be a period without any volunteers at the community and the committee of the operation will be pretty much managing it all on their own.

Perhaps we really did make an impact, with our ideas if not our work there. The model we created became the standard for Microfinance conducted by Global Brigades in Ghana. Granted, we adapted from the FUNDER model they came up with in Honduras and consequently, they are more receptive to our community-oriented, social benefits-driven model. It was still a fantastic success. Looking back, we're just a bunch of 9 foreign students in Ghana for 10 days after all.

Colourful Choices

As we all move forward in our personal development, we realise that including the citizens in policy decisions and complex issues that involves their personal welfare is important. I was really heartened to see Lui Tuck Yew takes his time to write Facebook notes that intelligently engages the public - the ones explaining the formula PTC used for manage the fares and also the issue on quality of service. It is important to show that while there may be some problems with the system, it can never be perfect and that we need to get together and work on it. Suggestions should come forth, without fear of being shot down even if they may be truly dull (I personally don't agree with public transport nationalization).

As Tim Harford said, we should acknowledge the complexity of the world and stop suffering from the God Complex - leaders who have the courage to say, "I've no idea if this works but information I gathered point this way; there's a chance we may fail but let's work together to try something else if that really happens."

Using moralistic arguments or trying too hard to stand by an action that have been taken usually produce flawed arguments that reduces a leader's credibility. Bear in mind that there's no end to issues of 'fairness'. Lim Boon Heng's statements cited in this article is such a grave disappointment. It's amazing how the reporter arranged the quotes to stay perfectly objective while surfacing the flaws of the argument made. Given the education levels of Singaporeans today, it seemed somewhat embarrassing that our leaders are trying to bullshit us this way:

"You know raising bus fares is unpopular," he said. "But if we cannot raise bus fares, how will that impact your fellow workers? I am sure you will understand that it is not fair if they cannot get wage increases."

"But their wage increase will be funded by fare increases, which adversely impact the public."

[...]

"But from the worker's perspective, when there are millions in profits, they want the employer to pay them better wages," Lim added.

"To them, millions of dollars in profits is a lot of money, and the commuting public feels fare increases are not justified."

SMRT posted net earnings of S$161.1 million for the financial year that ended this March, while SBS Transit had a net profit ofS$54.3 million for last year.

And what's wrong? There's no way to argue that fare hikes are for the transport workers. We all know that financial accounting puts down wages and salaries of workers of the firm as expenses in the income statement. Millions of dollars of profits are basically fares/revenues that did not go to the transport workers. Of course, they went to the people who contributed the capital and own the firm. Who is to guarantee that a fare hike would mean money is directed to the workers? If we want the wages of the workers to rise, why can't we reduce the profits of the owners instead? The last thing we need is the nationalization of public transport; what we need is perhaps better regulation. Perhaps PTC and NWC can work together, and negotiate both the fares and the wages?

Extra platform should be at Clementi and not Jurong East...

I could do a deeper analysis of SMRT and SBS Transit's patterns of cost and revenue and we could see profit margins have been constant or steadily increasing over the years. If it's been increasing, we can conclude that either the owners have exercised good cost control but refused to share some of the profit gains with the workers, or that hikes in fare so far have mainly been used to raise profit margins rather than to defray costs.

Let's use SMRT's figures as a demonstration: In 2007, fares rose 1.1%, FY2007 profit margins was 10.5%; in 2008, fares rose 0.7%, FY2008 profit margins was 13.5%; in 2009, fares fell by 4.6%, profit margins soared to 18.5% and then finally in 2010, fares were raised 0.5% and profit margins dipped a little to 18.2%. I'm not sure if my simplistic comparison of the time series of these figures distorts reality but I leave intelligent readers to arrive at their own conclusions. But I do want to remind readers that it is possible for fare reduction to invite more commuters, improve the green-ness of our economy, while providing that very profit boost that can be poured into investing for more capacity to reduce the overcrowding - perhaps already demonstrated by some figures I've presented.