Thursday 14 February 2019

OH WHAT A "WONDERFUL" MESS!

I suppose that with the world economy heading towards the shitter, we cannot blame all of Malaysia's economic woes on our "New Malaysia" government, the top leaders of which are currently paying more attention to politicking and horse trading members of parliament, arguing over whether or not PAS received an RM90 million donation or bribe from 1MDB funds, accusing ministers and deputy ministers and heads of GLCs of having degrees from unaccredited universities or claiming to have professional qualifications, bringing up issues of race and religion, filing reports to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission or to the police over alleged wrongdoings of others, suing each other over allegations of defamation and so forth, antagonise China, antagonise our neighbour Singapore and so forth.

And all the above, when we have bigger issues such as this issue below, reported in The Sun of 13 February 2019.


MALAYSIAN Employers Federation (MEF) estimates that 30,000 workers will be laid off this year, citing the increasing cost of business as the main reason for the big jump in retrenchment.

Last year, about 21,000 people lost their jobs.

Given the bleak outlook for the job market, MEF urged the government to help employers retain their workers so that both employers and employees can benefit soonest when the economy recovers.

MEF executive director Datuk Shamsuddin Bardan (pix) pointed out that the economy both within and without Malaysia was on the downward trend, posing a big challenge to employers in maintaining their current level of profitability.

"Employers' main concern is the increasingly higher input costs.

"In Peninsular Malaysia, employers are not only affected by the 10% hike in minimum wage but also the new policy requiring them to pay Socso for their foreign workers.

"We can expect some employers to revamp their business model, resulting in retrenchment."

Shamsuddin said this when asked by Nanyang Siang Pau for his take on the economic outlook for Malaysia and the challenges facing employers.

He said last year, which saw some 21,000 employees retrenched, was not too bad compared with 2017 in which about 30,000 were laid off.

But the situation will take a turn for the worse this year, to the extent that smaller companies might not be able to survive.

What employers need most during trying times is government assistance, he said, and urged the new Pakatan Harapan government not to introduce measures that will increase the input costs.

He suggested that the government provide incentives for employers to retain their employees instead.


What are our "New Malaysia" government's priorities?

Bloody useless government, I'd say. Like Neros fiddling, whilst Malaysians burn.

Don't you have anything better to do for Malaysia and Malaysians at large?

Oh yeah! You guys plan to set up an Economic Action Council to deal with our economic woes. Well, let's see how that pans out.

The Prime Minister's own communications and media advisor does not think too much about the reasons for this Economic Action Council:-

"New economic council a message to 'selfie-taking', underperforming ministers, says Kadir"

Then the Pakatan-friendly Parti Sosialis Malaysia's Environmental Bureau organises a forum on 13 February 2019 (which was subsequently postponed) on whether or not Malaysia needs to adopt nuclear power stations.
 


Now where the hell is the Rumah Attap Library & Collective?

I suppose they expect everyone who receives this notice to do a Google search to find out the address of this Rumah Attap Library & Collective.

I did and found it to be at 84C, Jalan Rotan, Off Jalan Kampung Attap, Kuala Lumpur but even then, locating the venue in realspace was quite a chore and when I walked in, there were some people there who were puzzled about this event having been scheduled to be held there that night.

Meanwhile, in a white paper of 23 August 2008, the Malaysian Nuclear Society presents its arguments in favour of Malaysia having nuclear power for our energy security, and I had expected that its speaker Dr. Mohd Syukri Yahya would have argued in favour of Malaysia having nuclear power at the forum, had it not been cancelled.


On the other hand, I had expected that Malaysia's veteran environmental activist Ir. Gurmit Singh would have argued against nuclear power.

But why all this when Malaysia currently has no nuclear electricity generation plants nor has indicated any intention to have nuclear power plants, well for now at least.

Meanwhile, consumption of now very much more affordable solar power has ramped up dramatically in the Asia-Pacific (especially China), North America and Europe.

So too are investments in solar and wind power worldwide ramping up dramatically.

The above figures are from a You Tube video of a presentation made by energy analyst Marin Katusa of Katusa Research presentation – San Francisco  21 Novemeber 2017.

According to Wikipedia - "The levelised cost of energy (LCOE) is a measure of a power source that allows comparison of different methods of electricity generation on a consistent basis. It is an economic assessment of the average total cost to build and operate a power-generating asset over its lifetime divided by the total energy output of the asset over that lifetime."

With LCOE of wind and solar electricity generation utility (excluding rooftop solar installations and home wind generators) being about half that of nuclear and coal powered electricity generation plants, why not look forward and explore how Malaysia can tap wind or solar power instead of nuclear power to achieve energy security?

Whilst the world is moving on, representatives of two NGOs were to debate on whether or not Malaysia needs to have nuclear power, when early in his presentation, Katusa displayed a pie chart showing that the sahre of consumption of nuclear generated electricity remained at 18% of all electricity consumed in North America in 2007 and 2017, whilst the share of consumption of green-generate power (wind, solar and geothermal) increased from a mere 3% in 2007 to 14% in 2017, mostly replacing the consumption of coal and natural gas generated electricity, the share of which feel from 66% in 2007 to 55% in 2017. 

To be fair, perhaps Gurmit would have argued for wind or solar power instead but the forum did not happen as originally planned. Perhaps he will mention something about wind and solar energy if the forum is eventually help.

Meanwhile, I've not heard about any proposals for wind and/or solar electricity adoption by the current Malaysian government.

As for Malaysia's energy security, whilst nuclear power may enable Malaysia to reduce our reliance on petroleum and other fossil fuels, however in times of war, the more centralised nuclear power plants will be more vulnerable to being take out and rendered inoperative in an attack, such as a missile attack, with all the consequences of leaking radioactive material and so forth. On the other hand, more geographically distributed solar and wind electricity generation facilities are less vulnerable to being completely taken out in event of an attack.

Oh yes! So are big data centres vulnerable to military or terrorist attack, which would disable the data centre and disrupt all the Internet-based services, such as shared services, Internet banking, e-mail and so forth hosted on the hundreds or thousands of servers within them. We already know how many of our e-mail services hosted on servers in the United States were disrupted by earthquake off Taiwan on 26 December 2006, which severed the submarine cables carrying Internet traffic between Malaysia and North America. Even with mirror sites located elsewhere, the loss of a site from which we get our fastest Internet responses from will slow down our Internet access significantly. 

Yours trully

Politischeiss

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