Recent Observations

1. People in the Southbound trains don't move in at Dhoby Ghaut in the morning. It's a bit of a pain when you see dancing room in the middle of the carriage and everyone else is oblivious to the hoards trying to get in. Yes, it's my fault I live along the NEL. But it's yours for not being considerate. Move in dammmit, please. That PCK campaign did a whole lot of good.

2. I am now on Starhub broadband. Honestly, it doesn't cut muster, compared with the MIO connection I had with Singtel. Between my Mac and the router, it's 130Mbps. Sounds great but no one knows what's happening with the speed through the SCV cable. Youtube comes in drips and draps, nothing really loads progressively. It's another painful observation.

3. More on HDB. After building too many flats in around the turn of the millennium, HDB decided to seriously push the Build To Order system as a means of gauging demand and not overbuilding. The situation with BTO projects is the time lag. Usually successful applicants have to wait 2-3 years before their 'dream home' comes to fit some space in the sky. They've been building Duxton flats since 2005 and they still aren't done. So what's come of that move is that the resale market has seen spectacular attention and growth. The number of property agents around is a sure sign that it's a lucrative profession worthy of pushy, sometimes conniving, sales people who want to sell you/sell your flat for that 1% commission. At flat prices averaging let's say 300K, that 1% is $3000, nearly double the average Singapore income. If an agent transacts 5 homes in a month, that's potentially $15K. It's no wonder that resale prices are going up - to feed some greedy mouths. The other reason for not having a glut of public housing is that it keeps the private property market healthy too.

4. Stuff that shouldn't be privatised, in my opinion, includes the transport system and the job of SCV cabling. Especially the latter. Looks what's happened with the soccer screening rights tussle/fiasco. Starhub has dug up the island and put in its own cable which it doesn't want to share to deliver jacked up cable TV content to 530,000 households. Singtel on the other hand owns the telephone lines. So they got smart and start leveraging that to run bigger bandwidth services, namely MIO and MIO TV. In the middle are all us folks who have to choose or get everything to watch everything we want. It's no wonder people are downloading to get their TV fixes instead of paying. Cosciences are clear I bet. Internet, the great liberator of media and controls and payment. The powers that be should have laid the cable and leased them to whoever wants to bring in cable content. Done deal. All players in, and consumers choose what they want. Well.

Oh dear, getting into the habit of listing. Hope it doesn't put you off.