Babies for Bozos

It's that part of my life, yet I feel I am not quite there. Everyone I've known for at least 10 years are making plans for the future. They are starting a new family. I remember each and everyone, some all the way back to Standard 1 and some hanging by the corner near FAC. Family planning with kids involves a Theory, an Execution and a Contingency.

The Theory is what you would want or hope for your family to turn out in the end, 20 years from the beginning. What kind of schools you'd want to get your kids into, what will they become, where will they be staying and working, what kind of educations they will have, what kind of friends they will be hanging with. You will sometimes dream on to their kids what their kids will be like.

The Execution is what you need to do to ensure every Theory works out according to plan. The income you will need to be making to sustain the lifestyle you want for them, the people you need to hang out with to ensure a safe spot in the school you want them studying in, the society you need to get into so your kids will have their children as friends.

The equation is simple: The smaller the gap between Theory and Execution, the closer the Result is to Perfection. So long as everything remains on the rail, you will be giving your kids the best life any parent can provide, and they will be properly nourished to tackle their future. And you will be a proud and successful parent. If only it was that simple.

Today we talk about the Contingency: what happens when Shit hits the Fan. We are not talking about having a Tamagochi dinosaur or a pet dog. Kids are people and people are the hardest to compute, sum up and categorize. Believe me, shit will always hit the fan.

1. Not Your Photocopy
Your children, each and every one of them, are individuals by themselves. Make sure you get that into your heads. They have their own rights, they make their own choices (well eventually). Most common error with parents is that they try to turn their kids into them. Parents would make their kids like their food,hobbies and brands. They would also make their kids become what they couldn't when they were younger for whatever reasons. Hold on there, smarty-pants. Your kids are not created by you so you can mold however you please!

2. Not With Cages and Chains
There is a difference between children and animals, by law at least, and that is you do not chain and cage your children. Obedience is never taught to human beings by fear and power. Do that and you'll most certainly get rebellion. If it is difficult for you to comprehend this new and actual effective method, learn it. If, after learning, you still don't believe in it, get a dog instead. If you still insist on having children then god bless you because you'll be facing some really nasty 3-week constipation on fan.

3. Lead by Action
Why is it that so many times we see leaders and preachers finding it hard to influence and change their followers? Because they do it by speech while their followers learn from their actions. Tell your kids to buckle up in the back seat when you don't, tell your kids not to drive like an ass while doing 160 and weaving through traffic, tell your kids to be polite when you curse at everyone who gets in your way. Stupid people will know your kids will be more of what you are than what you say you are.

4. Filter your own Shit
There may come a time when you realize you have married the wrong person. You want a divorce and you want custody. Fight, by all means, but NEVER involve your kids. Seriously, your kids didn't marry that person, you did. Your kids don't hate your spouse, you do. So don't let your kids carry the burden of your mistakes. Your kids see the both of you as their parents; role models and their protectors and guides into the world. Don't bitch about your spouse to your kids just so they will hate him/her they way you do! Filter your problems. If possible don't let your kids know a single thing.

5. Know Your Side
Your son will call you one day, having snuck out your car, that he crashed it. You will be pissed mad and emotional and wanting to kill him so bad. When you arrive at the scene, the other driver, an older man, comes up to you and says it's all your son's fault. You know your son is capable of causing this mess. Will you take the older man's word and scream at your son, or will you first ask your son what happened? Parents need to know when to punish their children, and when to protect them.

6. Compare to Nothing
Don't you hate it when your parents and their siblings always compare you and your cousins? And their friends' kids too? Remember what it felt like being compared to when you were young, and make sure you don't do the same. Everyone is individually different. Being good in math doesn't make you any better than a person who prefers literature or hair styling. The world is big, and it requires people of different interests and passions to keep it turning.

7. Queer Ready
Get yourself educated in homosexuality, in case you will have to face this with your kids. Gays do not choose to be so. They are born that way, like Down Syndrome and Lactose-intolerant. It is, if you'd like, a birth defect. Where on Earth would you find people who would prefer to be stigmatized and in some countries jailed and hung, instead of being 'normal'? If you're the kind of parent who desperately needs grand children, increase your odds by having more kids. If you're a parent who thinks being gay is disgusting and completely intolerable, then maybe we can find you a time machine so you can be taken back to the 1600s, where you belong.


If you think being a parent is in-born because we're all meant to have babies and they're been doing it fine for the past one thousand years and it's not quantum mechanics, consider again stupid. There is no Ctrl-Z here. Don't have babies just because everyone's doing it and sex is fun, or that you suddenly feel it would be nice to have more people running around at home.

Well but then again everyone's entitled to their own methods. Knock yourselves out, people. And if they don't turn out the way you'd hope, you can always leave them locked in the car under hot sun so they'd die of heatstroke and you can get away with some insurance money, and try for a new one that night.

Save My Curry Laksa

Fellow KLites, we are facing a dire situation: our restaurant food quality is dipping at a record rate! Some 15 years ago, stall food were cheap and uber awesome. Not anymore. If nothing is being done to curb this calamity, we will soon see ourselves becoming Singapore ( sorry neighbors, but I have to honestly say food over at your place are anything but nice. Too healthy maybe).

My under-educated reasoning tells me these are the causes:

1. Perception of Standards
When in school students were asked what their ambitions were. Because the students were fairly young, their teachers would often give them suggestions. Doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer, accountant, pilot. From there perceptions were sown into their young minds that these are the only respectable people to be. Parents who labor in foodstalls would also tell their kids to study hard for an office job that pays well and lets you sit in air-conditioned rooms all day long. Who can tell me that office jobs are easy? Do they also come with Dreams?

For people with parents still running a foodstall, consider the following:

Our parents were mostly minimally educated, and don't really know how to make money work for them. They know that you exchange sweat for honest amounts of money. Their calculations are very linear, how many hours of work equals how much income. You on the other hand are educated. What your parents have is more valuable than any salary-paying job out there. Oldtown White Coffee is a classic example.

In an employment you will never be able to reach the top of the ladder, because you will never own it. Don't be mistaken though, company share ownership only gives you the perception you own part of the company so you can work harder.

2. Taking It Easy
Look at all the foodstalls out there today. If they are bad, most probably they're manned by foreign workers. Honestly, I don't trust my Char Siew rice to a Vietnamese, no matter how good they are at Cantonese. Stall owners opt for foreign workers, mainly because of 2 reasons: they are cheap, and their own kids find it embarrasing to operate their stalls because it's got no class.

Its probably not lucrative if you only operate one stall, but what if you have a chain? Come on, if Ramlee can train business owners to make burgers consistent throughout the country, why can't chicken rice be consistent?

Matter of Protection
Foodstalls, in a way, represent a culture in Malaysia. A culture quickly losing its place, replaced by restaurants our parents say ' Con Ang Mos'. Now we are being conned into air-conditioned restaurants with comfy seats and cleaner appearance, and steeper prices and worse food.

Setup a strong union or organization. Provide proper trainings on clean food preperation, move them to better hawkers centers, allow them to plan for chains and franchises. Most importantly keep the secret recipes passing down generations and you will maintain the food quality. Setup a social networking site that will promote hawker food, allow the public to rate and comment so others can see and try.

I don't need to teach anyone how they can spend their RM50 million wisely. I only wish that i can still bring my kids Curry Laksa hunting like I did when I was younger. No not like Paparich or Madam Kwan kinda Con Ang Mo Curry Laksa.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Parliament of Crooks

Firstly I would like to apologise for not attaching an enticing photo with today's post. My computer crashed on me last week, and this stupid iPad does not allow me to upload anything online. Well then on to more pressing matters now, shall we.

Who are the ones actually making these margins all these while? Your bosses. Why was it that you have never felt the need to constantly ask for a raise? Because they give you a 10% raise once every 3 years and marginally increase your benefits once every 3 years to make you happy. 
Say for example you have superb insurance coverage provided by your employers, which they pay every month, and which you will add to your value because they are benefits. But have you asked yourself the important question When Will I Need It? The answer is after your retirement. The answer is after you leave the company. The answer is You Cannot Use It When You Actually Need It. 
Your bosses are actually only giving you the impression that your value is higher than your actual pay, but it is not. When it comes down to actual dollars and cents, your bosses are the only ones getting richer. 

Inflation is not an excuse for your bosses to not increase your pay. Inflation does not make money disappear into thin air. Inflation actually means your pay going up, but you also find that cost of living is also doing the same.

What do you do? If you plan to stay where you are and hope a strong union will bail you out of the situation, keep dreaming. The banking industry already have strong unions, and look at how silly the bankers have to suck up to their leaders just to move up in ranks. 

We need to change. We need to understand that we are worth more than what these fat bastards are paying us now. The government needs to protect us from foreign competition. When companies don't get to employ at the rate they're paying, and can't look into foreigners, they will eventually increase the pay. And when a new balance is reached, people will actually start to enjoy their work. 

But you will "Cheh" me and say "If Only It Was That Easy". I can tell you that as long as you don't believe, it will never happen. Who says life was easy? But it is worth being passionate about. 

The Cost of Benefits

Prices go up, all around us. 15 years ago we can afford a bowl of curry noodles for RM 2.50. Now it's easily RM 4.00. Everyone says its inflation, inflation and inflation. But do they know what inflation really is? To explain inflation, we will first forget about it, because inflation is only good when people are actually rich enough to inflate the prices of commodity around us.

So without inflation, where did the margin between RM 2.50 and RM 4.00 go? Some would go to the uncle/aunty making the noodles in the stalls. Some would also go to the people who made the noodles and curry powder. And also the people who rared the chicken and caught the prawns. Between year 1996 and 2011, cost of every bowl of noodles went up by an average of RM 1.50. By right everyone involved in producing the bowl of noodles and renting the stalls would have made more. But they are not. Shocking? This gets even worse in the corporate industries, where educated professionals enter the workforce getting paid peanuts. 15 years ago fresh graduates looking for marketing jobs get paid RM 1200 a month. Today they get, at most RM 1400.

Now lets factor in inflation. In the simplest terms, inflation actually equals the people's spending power. Given that goods and services are always scarce and limited, people's ever growing demands will drive prices up. When the people make more money, they will naturally be able to better afford goods that they demand. They will then pay a price higher than market rate in order to attain what they want, simply because they can now afford it. This is inflation.

But given that, for example, the price of a bowl of curry noodles is now almost 100% more expensive than it was 15 years ago, and that the monthly pay for an average Marketeer has gone up by a mere 20%, where did all the inflation come from?


I don't compare apples to oranges because on a greater scale, everything is inter-related. A market supplies goods and services as just that, and how much they are worth depends on how rich the people demanding them are.


Who makes all the money? Why is it that you couldn't see what was in front of your face all these while? Maybe there will be an answer to this next week.

Drivers We All Love

We hate it, rude and reckless drivers. We hate it because we chose to be civil and abide by the road rules, yet they get to weave in and out of lanes however they please. We hate it because we wait patiently in line while they simply overtake from the emergency lane and force their way back into traffic way in front of us. We hate the way they beat traffic lights when we need to stop for them. We hate their inability to allow cars from slip streams or other lanes make lane-changes. We hate it when they tailgate you on the highway and keep flashing their headlights to get you to give way.  We hate their lack of respect for our attempt at showing some respect for each other on the road. We hate the fact that they are so arrogant because they drive expensive cars and we don't.

What goes through our heads when they do these things to us is that they must be laughing at us and calling us stupid idiots for not doing what they did. And that gets our tempers flared up. That pisses us off. That makes us swear that next time won't be that easy. Next time we will not let them pass! But what if next time, the person trying to pass has a pregnant passenger who's water just broke and is going into labour? What if the one you will not allow to pass is having diarrhoea and is rushing to the nearest toilet before it explodes? What if the next one is actually rushing to hospital? Recent newspaper article proves that most Malaysians, in emergencies, do not rely on Ambulances to take them to hospitals.

So they drive their own cars. Their cars, like ours, do not have the words AMBULANS written across the front. They do not have sirens on their roofs. They may be SUVs, they may be sedans. They may also be one of those lala-fied Wajas that look like a 5 Series. What is important is that they may be rushing to prevent a death. May I ask you now, how much do you have to lose when you allow them passage? What do you have to sacrifice whenever you let them through? I know that you may save a life.

Sure most of the time the ones you meet on the roads will be the ones who laugh at you and call you stupid for waiting in line instead of using the emergency lane. We will just have to be the kind of drivers who adhere to road rules because they are there for a reason. And we will also allow reckless drivers pass because one in the ten you let pass will be on their way to the hospital, and they will thank you in their hearts for your kindness and for not being judgemental. Their loved ones will be saved. They will in the future learn to let other reckless drivers pass because they know that one in ten will be rushing to a hospital. We're not here to teach each other lessons in life. But again, I don't get myself stuck in daily rush hour traffic as often as most I know so I'm not really in the place to preach.