Life For Rent

Gahment making their promises on vehicle ownership come true..

IN A bid to reduce traffic congestion along expressways and roads and encourage commuters to use alternative routes, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) is setting up nine more Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantry points, including in the HDB heatrtlands, and extending the operational hours of current points.

Each new gantry will cost between $1mil and $1.5mil to build.

Currently, the ERP hours are from 7.30am to 9.30am.

Motorists will also be charged 50 cents for entering the CTE between 7am and 7.30am as well as between 9.30am to 11am.

There will be no changes to ERP charges at the other three gantries on the south-bound CTE.

On the north-bound CTE, a new gantry – before the Pan-Island Expressway (PIE) exit – will be operational between 5.30pm and 10.30pm.

On the east-bound East Coast Parkway, two new gantries have been installed – one before the Rochor Road exit and the other on the Ophir Road slip road.

They will be operational between 6pm and 8pm on weekdays.

On the south-bound Bukit Timah Expressway (BKE), a new gantry has also been built after the Dairy Farm exit, before the BKE joins the PIE. It will be operational from 7.30am to 9am.

Five more new gantries are planned. They will be built at Toa Payoh Lorong 6, Upper Boon Keng Road, Kallang Bahru Road, Geylang Bahru Road and after Hume Avenue.

The LTA says it will monitor the traffic conditions along those roads. If they do not meet the optimum speeds of above 45kph on expressways and 20kph on other roads, LTA will activate the gantry points.

LTA made these announcements on Thursday following Transport Minister Raymond Lim’s visit to the completed first phase of the upcoming Kallang Paya Lebar Expressway (KPE).

PM Lee has declared making the purchase of annuities compulsory. As with many others, I really do not see why the government has to hold my money and pay me till aged 85. I am in favor of medisave though, great plan I feel.

Let’s look at annuities. All CPF contributors have a buy annuities with money from the minimum sum at withdrawal age. The  ‘gahment’ has said it will be a fraction, not the whole 99k. You will still get your payouts till your min sum has run out, and when that happens, the annuitity kicks in till you die, paying about half of what you would get from your cpf payout perhaps?

CPF members will start contributing to this ‘pool’ of money. Should you die before aged 85 before your annuity kicks in for you, that pool of money will be used to support others who are still alive. This is the part I feel very strongly against. They said everyone should be  responsible for themselves. Now, my money is being taken away from me unwillingly to support a pool of people? WHY?

Also, eligible age to withdrawal your CPF will be increased. So this is what I get

- The gahment holds MY money for even LONGER. God knows if even live to 65 which will be the new age

- I pay money to support this annuity ‘pool’. Isn’t this like welfare schemes in other countries?!?!

- If I die ‘prematurely’, my ‘vested’ money supports others instead. This means my family will inherit substantially lesser out of my CPF, which a big fraction of it going to the public. WTF.

As if it is not enough, as one forumer pointed out, the middle class and upper class is a widening gap too. It comes to a point where young professionals should not earn too much. The low income have PLENTY of housing benefits. But once you earn enough (couples a combined income of 8k, which is rather easy to achieve isn’t it?) are rich enough to be excluded from housing grants, rebates etc, yet they pay more income taxes compared to the lower income, yet get no benefits! No benefits, and you have to take up bank loans because HDB is not going to subsidise  your loan if you earn higher than the cap.

I think this is ridiculous. I guess in Singapore, either you be very poor, or very rich. If you are very rich, you don’t care about annuities or loans. You pay cash for every damn thing because you can BLOODY AFFORD it. If you are poor, you get grants and guess what, a low income person can afford a 5-room HDB flat.  Can you imagine that?So be poor, get subsidised for everything and why not. You pay easily 50-80k lesser than your middle class counter parts going for the same flat.

Suddenly I feel very unhappy with all these changes. Seriously, it is true isn’t it? Gahment give you 1%, but they take back 3% and even that 1% is LOCKED IN. During elections and GST hikes etc, they promised the middle class will not be left out. But look at what is happening?

I still can’t believe the pool of money shit in annuities. It sounds so much like the swiss fraud thing. Oh yeh did I mention? If you want a HIGHER payout for your annuity at age 85, you need to pay HIGHER premiums. This is like, I take $1 from you and will give you back 50c in time. If you want more, pay me $2 and I will return you $1.40. CRAP.

The only good news is, due to the higher IR for the first 60k in your account, you get more money. Not a lot, but definitely more. Current rates keep you going to 85. With the increases, projected sum will keep you going till aged 89.

How many will live to 89? But that is okay, CPF can still be handed down to your family.

BUT…

89. Do we still need annuities?

This sounds like a con job. But I will hold that conclusion till details are released. Even then, we don’t have a choice do we? Mandatory participation, or you can renounce your citizenship. Everytime something advances 1 step, we go 2 steps behind.

For those who are in the know, I am sexually deprived! Urgh. I hope that will change real soon when a wound of mine heals completely.

Moving on, it is my first year anniversary with my honey bunny next week! I have been cracking my head on where to go for a nice meal. I don’t want just a view, discount and lousy food (Equinox) or good steak yet overrated (Morton’s) or a noisy place with kids running around although the place has good food. What I want in order would be:

- Good ambiance and excellent service where no servers or anyone at all will upset us and spoil the night

- Great food

- Reasonable price, but I am prepared to pay a premium price for it. Haven’t I been saving anyway for such stuff?:P

Am glad to say I have made my pick and made reservations. It is so exciting! I will blog about it with photos. If they please me enough I’ll definitely recommend them out although it means now I won’t have the serenity the place provides! BUT.. hang on, it doesn’t matter if the place is full because it will have a private area. How private? Ahhh… that is for you to find out.  After we have had our fun there muahahaah!

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For your info, I received this email too. It failed to get stopped by my spam filters. grrr..

I haven’t posted any views on the sub prime credit issues as well as the rising yen effects on the market for I am no economist and will not be able to offer an educated analysis. However looking at the chart, the STI rebounded really strongly yesterday. In fact, it flew over 6% higher, the second biggest jump since 1998. What do I expect?

The credit issues have not bee resolved yet. I do expect the stock market to tumble today due to investors selling on strength. Hedge funds have already pulled out, mostly, while the others may be looking for opportunities to sell. At this point, the banking stocks have plunged down again, with DBS leading a drop of $1. The volatility will remain probably, till the credit issues are clearer, and investor confidence returns. At the moment you see low trading volumes still, suggesting people are playing a wait and see. The action still comes from penny stocks and warrants, along with selected blue chips. Regional bourses closed higher today except for STI which I think will close in the red. It is still hard to say where this will go. Hopefully by september-october things get a little clearer and investors come back into the market. I don’t expect any further major plunges, but that all depends on any bad news released in wall street over the nagging credit issues. I don’t think it is time to join the market yet. But for those who are already in, 2 options. Cut loss and buy back at a later date, or just hold and ride the wave if you have holding power. No one really knows what is in store. And no point doing hindsight trading. EVERYONE will be multi billionaires if we could do hindsight trading. This correction is larger than the one earlier this year, and it seems to match the may-june correction last year, looking at patterns. But history does not imply the future, so keep your eyes on the market news and stay side-lined for a while more.

Ausgroup released their results and they upped their profit by 70%. Buy calls have also been issued by analysts and the counter is now CD, pending a $6.10 dividend payout per lot. I like this stock although the PE is rather high, but a tad lower than its competitors in the same industry such as KS Energy still. It has lots of volume even during the crunch period. Overall, it has lost about 60c during the current correction but I see a lot of upside for this once things settle down.

Sit tight. If you haven’t already puked your guts out during the recent bumpy ride, I think you’ll be fine. But we can’t see what is round the corner can we? I doubt even Warren Buffett can, although he has one of the best foresight in the industry. For a company that he runs with a mere 14 headcount, his stocks was once worth $100,000 a share. How many can even afford to buy 1 share, not to mention 1 lot? I don’t know the current price now… don’t dare to see also. But he is the closest to ‘God’ already. His compounding theory is very powerful. Rewards come for those who are patient. But most of us are not patient enough to hold for 20 years. Ideally, we sell if we know there is a correction ahead, and buy on weakness again at a lower price. But no one can time the market. Fundamentally strong companies only have 1 way to go, which is up. So hold, and watch the value rise.

But of course, I can’t do that. There is a reason why there is only 1 Warren Buffett.

For those who have a male brain like many do including me, and you cannot find your way to registering yourself to post comments, here’s how it is done:

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3. If you are looking at old entries and find some entries chopped off, click on the – as seen in the title bar. The problem came from the lack of a title on my old blog so there is nothing much I can do about this. But all new entries should be fine.

My destination next year… anyone wanna follow?

And yes, I have sorta successfully moved the blog to word press! Took me quite a while and there are still minor issues like getting the pictures to work but will sort them out soon enough. Tired out enough tonight. Been at the gym on a weight losing regime but there is nothing to stop me from a steamboat dinner with the dear and ceddy at marina south. Cool weather and hey, we didn’t feel sticky or perspired one bit. How cool indeed!

It is monday and all.. all set for another week. Are you?

Oh yes, for those who want to post comment, please register. I have set it up to be auto and all will be given enough rights to post comment. It is better this way so spammers cannot find their way in since there is a need to validate a real human behind. Should stop the bots in the tracks.

Will be giving this whole website an entire make over in time. Hopefully by the end of the year when I release my year end mix show. Pretty excited about it but worried there may be too much traffic involved. Hmmm… will see what happens.

Till then, keep smiling!

At last I have moved the site over successfully. I wasn’t able to complete testing word press in time so I decided to setup the database and restore all blog data from the old server to the current one here. Took me all Sunday to get things replicated over. Once things have stabalised, I will get word press working for the blog. I think it is better and neater too.

And I am very excited cause I have a HUGE web space, and I can create unlimited number of email addresses literally. Who wants a sillypore ID?

It sure has a lot of funky stuff and I will explore each of them when I have time. Maybe I should create my new website using Joomla? And I will be creating an audio streaming page where I will feature my mixshows. How cool eh? That will take time to design of course.

Back at work today after being on leave since last Tues afternoon where I had my surgery. Gawd it hurt. Maybe I just really suck at needles and pain. Looks like I can never do tattoo without being knocked out first. It is better now but all I’d say is, morning errections are KILLING me! But it aint half as bad as the first one I did. Nasty..

Got a little sun burnt from the beach on Friday.. back to the clubs where things were a lot better this time round. Alex, Ceddy, me, my dear, ben, davin, jamal and a lotta good music too! Watched 881 on Saturday. Touching at times, funny at other times. I think it is a good production personally, just that it is not quite my cup of tea that makes me sit up throughout its entirety. Do all fellow bananas feel the same?

I also found out my ex gf, Joey is working in the same building as I am! How cool! But we don’t have time to meet up for lunch yet although we chat a little here and there in emails. She just had a baby and we were talking bout some stuff when the topic came to giving birth naturally or through caesarean section. My mom didn’t want to breastfeed, too troublesome she thinks. She took medication to ensure milk will not be produced. She also took me out 2 weeks before due via c-section. As with my other 2 half brothers. Clearly it is an elective choice and she did not want to go through more than 12 hours of labour. You know what, all 3 births were done by the same gyne, Dr Chong Kwan Dick. My next brother was 12 years apart. Maybe I was a handful? Maybe she never wanted kids to begin with? I was cared most by my grandmother and she has her own take on the former question. As for the latter, only she knows. But I do remember she did say very clearly why she never breastfed nor wanna go through labour.

I feel all mothers should go through labour if their health permits. Maybe it is me, but to see your child come out after all the pain and pushing could be something that can never be simulated. I was yanked out even before I was due. Wrong start from the beginning? I don’t really know.. all I know is I am far closer at heart with my dad, even though I only see him once or twice a year. Does the baby feel love through a labour, or breastfeeding? It is anyone’s guess, but my opinion is, if you can give your child the best, why not? Isn’t he or she worth it? Imagine how you feel when someone tells you I didn’t wanna go through labour as it is too tiring, or didn’t want to breastfeed cause it is too troublesome and she didn’t wanna smell like a cow. How wanted can you feel, especially when you know all of the above were elective choices, and not due to medical reasons beyond choice.

And maybe it is still just being me, but I can remember hurtful words said to me since I was 4. I can remember the location, the scenario and the words said. While most weren’t mean to be said, they were nonetheless, said. What is said cannot be taken back, as they say. Especially during growing up years. Even during my time, kids aint stupid. Imagine how smart this generation can be. You may get away of saying something wrong there and then, but it never really goes away. My dad scolds, loudly even. You just know you don’t want to mess with him. But when he does scold I know what I did wrong. He doesn’t say mean and hurtful things. Things so hurtful, that I am thankful it is beginning to fade off my memory for I do not even want to remember. I just remember it was hurtful, but I don’t remember quite a few of them anymore. It wasn’t easy to sedate the angst in me as a kid. But I learnt how to deal with it. I used to go on bus rides, from north to south, from west to east, from one terminal to the other and be alone and just listen to music and see the world. I love the feel traveling brings. One of my favorite routes was bus service 145, from Buona Vista to Toa Payoh interchange. My grandma used to live in holland drive then so it would be my last stop. I have taken 7, when the very first superbus plyed the streets on that service. Some of us waited 4 or 5 buses before it was the superbus’ turn to start the journey. It was from Bedok interchange, towards Clementi interchange. Where were you, when the first superbus plyed the streets? It was probably 1993, but I could be wrong. I do remember I was probably sec 2 then.

More than a decade later, we have new versions of the superbus. The interchange remains largely the same I believe. Bus service 7 still departs from the same berth from bedok interchange, as it used to (I think). Somethings just don’t change and I like it. That’s so me.

But I love my new location at work! I think it is better and it is so fun. Now I do contradict the above eh? Maybe that is the real me. One big contradiction. But it is just me.