[[How has been]]

Sunday, September 27, 2020

[[DW documentaries]]

Watched quite a few DW documentaries (actually last week, I procrastinated). 4 in particular recently. The polluting of the citarum river by the textile industry in indonesia, the effects of the corona virus on slums in philippines, the impacts of trade agreements on the tomato industry in ghana and basically all the shit that happened in venezuela. Yknow, the best part is I actually met quite a few Venezuelan refugees in Latin America but I didn't think of their lives in that way before.

First thought was wow, such thought provoking documentaries that are somehow also balanced. Great stuff I should recommend it to other people.

Second thought was that people are really getting screwed over. Systemic injustices are really really serious and inequality is, I suppose, really hidden. It really is how the rich and powerful make some decision elsewhere for whatever their real interest (and purported interest) is and far far away, many many many powerless people pay the consequences.

2a) The poor in Singapore really have it good (compared to the poor elsewhere in the world). That is not to say we shouldn't help the poor in Singapore, but since I don't particularly privilege nationalism/nationalistic arguments, the point is that the worst-off are by and large really outside Singapore. And perhaps giving this perspective will be helpful for all involved. Though I think it will be near impossible to yknow, educate an entire population on how good we have it relatively when some of us have it much rougher than others.

I think it is because of this globalised world, these big power geopolitics and MNCs and billionaires that seem to crush hope that goodness in humanity will prevail over greed and exploitation.

For a good king can deal justly with his subjects and not exploit them and such. Pay a fair wage, collect fair taxes. But what if this means his country loses competitiveness on the global stage? What if it means then that his country's products lose external markets. And what if the internal market is not large enough?

Exploitation any where in the world, because of globalisation, affects everyone. Because tomato pickers are exploited in country x means tomato pickers in country y's wages will be depressed, as long as tomatoes are substitutable. What then? Do we just roll over and die because global injustices sound like very very big problems?

So like in Singapore, how do we pay low skilled workers a higher wage if there are so many people out there, due to systemic issues, being willing to work for a much lower wage when the labour they produce is substitutable easily? The economics really suggests that this is not feasible - because you will be out-competed on price by others that are more willing to exploit other people than you. I suppose the big issue is that exploited people provide a similar or higher quality/quantity of work than non-exploited people.

I suppose there are some partial solutions/responses -

1. the demand side solution where more discerning consumers that are willing to pay more for "ethical" considerations - somewhat seen in Europe but really... I'm personally not vested enough to care enough about where the supply chain of what and what is gotten from, I just buy based on price and quality and am quite price sensitive.

2. demand some sort of supply side legal protection for workers and stuff, raise awareness .etc. a very noble aim i suppose, which i think dw documentaries are doing a good work. But it seems to me that this will always be playing catch up... as long as massive inequalities exist and they will exist, the potential for exploitation is ripe and the gains are too attractive to resist.

3. join in the exploitation party, basically don't care that much downstream and lead a moral life, helping here and there. Though in the greater calculation, you could have wrecked more damage downstream that you dont see, you can, in your own eyes, be moral because of how you use your own resources and such that you see.

Well to end on a Christian note, God is in control and I just have to play whatever small part here in your life.

I suppose another thing to wonder about is whether there are creative ways to be able to give value that allows one to pay workers better - whether there is value added in a product that cannot be got through exploitation. Maybe things like good service.

[[I wrote this at]]*|11:15 PM|

[[On bail (bondsmen)]]

Actually I have two other posts to write about other stuff - some dw documentaries and the social dilemma.

When we look at a criminal justice system. I think we can pretty much take it for granted that it shouldn't be for profit. Only a ridiculous country that is worshipping money puts for profit elements into the criminal justice system. Funnily enough, criminals are among the most disempowered people in society because they don't have public opinion, moral authority and well, in most cases, most people rather not be criminals if they can help it. Of course I'm not talking about the mob leaders or like some twisted sick mind type, but the run-of-the mill people that get entangled up in the law. When it is for profit, these people already disempowered people and their families and communities get exploited really hard. And wow what s surprise, this does not bode well for the rest of society because they are part of society.

Ok so lets take it for granted that the state should bankroll this, for the main ideal of full justice. Perhaps let me armchair theorise that these might be good KPIs for "full justice".

1. That criminals are not let go free and the innocent are not punished (the most common, and baseline standard i suppose)

2. That the entire experience (not just punishment) is in proportion to the crime committed. If no crime is committed I believe there should be some compensation/restitution for a terrible experience? This area is quite linked to the top one. Though that being said, I think it gets very hazy when it gets to cases that are like, not guilty due to lack of conclusive watertight evidence...

3. State spending on delivering justice should be proportional to the amount of justice gained/obstructed. This means that the state (and society) resources will not be squandered too much on, say petty criminals. Enforcement action is expensive.

I suppose much has been said about 1 and 2.

For 3, funnily enough I think Singapore's system is pretty good. Basically we have like these auto-checks - anything to do with the govt really. That would be leaving the country, buying a house/car, applying for financial assistance, setting up a bank account? .etc .etc. And for many cases with small crime, basically the onus is on the person to turn up to court and such and sort it out. The onus is not on the enforcement people to hunt down these people only for them to pay, say, a small fine.

This is the case for many small crimes such as AWOL-ing from army, parking/speeding stuff .etc. (I believe). And its really great. Basically public resources are not wasted and most people voluntarily comply because they don't want to be out of society.

But perhaps Singapore is able to achieve this because we are pretty transparent a society. Where many things are being controlled by the govt. Where you can't buy a house in cash and the government has so much information about you that you literally have no way to run. But still, I think this option of letting people live a quasi-legal life and facing the music later is generally a sensible alternative to overspending on enforcement.

Ok, I suppose this wasn't particularly groundbreaking.

[[I wrote this at]]*|6:23 PM|

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

[[On preparation (for bible study?)]]

The traditional model of bible study has been prepare during the week and then meet to discuss. I would reckon, being done right, this would be most of the studying and learning comes from the individual preparation, maybe 50-70% and then the rest comes from the communal part where people might raise something that did not come to you. Something like that.

Contrast this to another model of bible study where everyone goes in unprepared, and spends the time to prepare from ground up, together.

Time wise... Not sure which will take longer, I reckon it might take about the same amount of time. In total, more or less. If you prepare fast, you might save some time preparing alone, if you prepare slow you might save some time in the second model.

Funnily, it seems to me that the education model - even working life- is entirely the second, for projects and everything else. Everyone starts from a blank slate to gain knowledge about whatever the subject matter is. Of course there are people that might "spoil market" and read the textbook ahead and stuff like that, well and good. And if they can gather together to discuss thats fine too, might be able to move ahead much quicker.

It seems to me that asking people around my age to prepare for bible study is quite futile. Due to many reasons. Maybe don't know how to prepare, maybe not motivated to, maybe whatnot. But it seems to me to ask people to come for longer time in bible study, is much more achievable. That is to say, 1 hr of prep + 1 hr of bible study vs 2 hour of bible study. 2 hour of bible study is much more achievable for most. EVEN IF you could technically just take the 1 hour before bible study to prep, most people just don't do it.

Given that, perhaps it makes sense to think of how to utilise a 2 hour bible study to gain the most out of the passage, can - as in thrown in the trash can - any expectation that members are going to prepare (even leaders? ahahah) and just use the extra time to level everyone up together. Would such a bible study be different from how it is currently done - questions to be answered ahead of time? Are there better methods to "prep together"? Basically should bible study as it is currently thought of be tweaked to better account for little or no preparation?

I find this might be like the issue CF faced when they assume people coming to CF already know their doctrine and how to read the bible and such from church and they want to do "higher level" stuff there. But for those that do not have the grounding, perhaps attempting "higher level" stuff might be not the best use of time. In the same way, if going through questions assumes that people have prepared, perhaps there ought to be ground work done before.

Another example that really came to mind is army's JIT (just in time) training. Basically for anything the army wants you to do, they will do a "just in time" training. Like if you gonna shoot a gun, they will teach you the basics of the gun, as a "refresher" just before the event. Funnily enough, I suppose it comes with use. If you shoot your gun every day, I suppose there is no need to do JIT. But if you don't, JIT becomes really helpful and important.

Maybe, then, it is how to do bible study for people that dont read the bible regularly? Hmm. I don't know to be honest, but I feel the current way of my church doing it is far from ideal. Not to mention other stuff about leaders training and such.

I suppose having a "streaming" for spiritual maturity doesn't make sense. Even though it would solve some of the issues, if anything, a bible study group shouldn't just be about efficiency maximising and pigeonholing in the name of efficiency/comfort. I think that a bible study ought to have different levels of spiritual maturity... What about different levels of commitment? Hmm.

[[I wrote this at]]*|11:26 PM|

Saturday, September 5, 2020

[[One suggested cause of wealth disparity some possible remedy]]

For today's post, let me try to make it more readable and less rambly and with clarity and a well defined scope, not an easy task.

Much has been written and said recently, in Singapore about returns on labour vs returns on investment or labour share of income. And the main debate is on whether capital is being too highly remunerated and labour being too lowly remunerated due to many factors. Chief of which is competition from foreign labour which is willing and able to work for lower wages and still, for themselves personally, mostly, benefit from it due to global inequalities.

What I want to focus on today is not, however, the difference between remuneration of labour and capital, but the difference in the growth of money for people of different amounts of wealth.

My central thesis: Govt should help lower wealth persons achieve decent returns on investment for up to a certain portion of their wealth - keeping in mind that the needy need their money to be liquid- so as to mitigate the effects of wealth inequality due to existing wealth inequality and create a more just and equitable society.

It seems obvious to me that, in an (unrealistic) ideal world, if all "held" money grows at the same rate, it would not be a contributing factor to wealth inequality - it would be neutral. This would mean, all "saved" money would be capital and all capital would have the same rate of return. This would further mean that savings are equally incentivised, and any differential in wealth (relatively, percentage wise at least) would not just come down to who already has more money. i.e it would be determined by other factors that are personal-choice dependent. It seems to me that such a system is way more equitable, without taking away the value that capital obviously confers as a valuable factor of production and incentivising saving.

How this would look like would be that a low-wage worker putting away 100 dollars every month would be able to enjoy the same compound interest rate on that 100 dollars/month as say, a wealthy man sticking in a 100k/month from rental income. Of course if it were a modest 3% compounded interest, over a 20 year span, he would get 33,211.78 which is interest of 9211.78. and of course the rich dude will get a thousand times of that.

In the current real situation, basically if you have less than say 3000 dollars in Singapore, you only have like 0.1 percent per annum current account. You can't get into real estate, you can't get into equity / bonds generally and even if you could, you might need the money to be liquid and hence be unable to enjoy any sort of returns on it.

And since you cannot get any decent amount of returns on it, it exacerbates the problem of the immediate gratification bias. For you just need to want to enjoy 100 dollar more today than 100.1 dollars more in a year before deciding to spend it right now and, given inflation, spending it now might be a good idea.

I suppose apps like robin hood .etc. are already making headway towards this... But here we are just talking about public listed stocks and bonds. There are many sorts of investments. From buying property to hostile takeovers and taking out debt and cutting benefits. I suppose the most exploitative has to be curbed by greater government oversight (as I understand they mostly are in Singapore but not London or elsewhere).

Yknow, I wanted to propose a sort of government like dept that would aggregate money and let people invest and some degree of financial literacy where the people just trust the dept and get whatever returns (of course minusing a proportional amount for cost), but yknow, nothing too much. And it would have to be fully transparent and well, pretty much opt-out at any time. I suppose that is the difficulty of having someone else manage your money. You need to trust them. Maybe a trusted govt is able to pull this off? Give a loan to allow sufficient liquidity, let a small team of people do some basic investing, maybe ETFs and some properties, make it entirely opt in, no minimum sum, no transaction fee, maybe a 0.5% management fee, and let basically small amounts of money aggregate enough so they can get some gains similar to having large amount of money - let poorer people have higher returns on their money and hence incentivise them, somewhat, to save more since this would be way better than the 0.1% or so in whatever current account currently.

I'm not sure how feasible this is. And probably the private sector through things like robin hood are already rising to meet this demand, though i think there are still transaction costs and the like. Nobody trusts a stranger to do whatever with their money. Would they voluntarily let the govt do it? Well on the bright side, you can be assured that the govt won't run a massive ponzi scheme on its citizens. Supposedly anyway.

Possibly, people just buy whatever amount into it and it goes into some fixed indices. Because people need liquidity, the "capital gains / dividends" can be issued at the end of each year proportional to the amount of money a person had in the account over time. What this means is, e.g I have a 1000 dollars every month from 5th of the month (when my pay comes in) to 20th of the month when my bills get deducted, (an average of half a month each month), and the "big fund" earns a ROI of 3% after deducting overheads, I get 3% of 500 or 15 dollars for that year. - To be honest this sounds a lot like robinhood but with one specific tailored ETF and lots of liquidity.

Anyway I thought this is more practical and actually do-able, letting poorer people basically band together to get some returns on the capital market. By helping them overcome some of the factors working naturally against them having any sort of ROI at all. One of which is liquidity, another of which is investment knowledge. And I suppose some sort of technical knowledge can be had with time - that many people are short on. Another sort of knowledge has to do with connections, or sensible, non-scammy connections. I think this suggestion is much more doable than arbitrarily raising wages or something I suppose.

Of course another way will be to tap on the current cpf model. I think cpf has a great mandate to help Singaporeans/PR prepare for retirement by having mandated savings and giving a guaranteed, relatively high interest rate on them by using these monies and having diversified investments.

One, I think, relatively simple way, if you don't want citizens to bear risk as outlined above, it could be a fixed interest rate of say 2% with all additional profits going into govt coffers elsewhere and all shortfalls covered from govt coffers. Of course the broad idea should be that the more risk is taken on by the govt, the more it should be limited in scope - either by the amount of money you are allowed to put in or by citizenry. The above above idea of basically allowing those with not much to very quickly jump in and out of some sort of investment can technically be run on the open market, doesn't necessarily need the government though having govt as someone that is trusted probably increase take-up. If done on the open market, can even be a source of govt income (if open to foreigners

This could take the form of another CPF account, e.g CPF flexi where you get 2.5% (so as to not be more than CPF OA ahahah) interest per annum with a maximum amount of 50k that is withdraw-able anytime/1 day processing. It could even be tiered - an opposite of the income tax version where the lower the wealth, the higher the interest rate. Maybe first 20k@2.5%, next 20k@2.4%, next 20k@2.3%, next 20k@2.2% and last 20k@2.0% for maximum of 100k. You can even tier it for PRs slightly different for whatever means. This interest would again, be proportional to the money a person had in the account over time. Ideally these funds should be as transparent as possible in how they are invested.

My contention is that, if paylah .etc technology. can keep transaction costs to 0-ish, all these monies pooled together can actually achieve the returns on investment sufficient to pay these interest rates. This is assuming that the big numbers keep the amount of pooled funds relatively stable - of course there must be some safeguards against bank runs or the like... But that can be factored in i'm sure. Maybe with a in principle loan i.e the govt gives emergency access to up to x amount of funds if it comes under liquidity threat.

How this helps the poor, is to put ownership into their hands and empowers them to take financial planning seriously, cpf model achieves the same thing (in terms of giving ROI on some money) but because it is mandated and more importantly, locked until a particular age, doesn't really teach anything on how to save .etc. and instead breeds resentment as "stealing money". It is a form of help them help themselves.

Obviously there are lots of other reasons why having wealth helps you get wealthier like having access to lower interest rates due to having better credit score, more collateral and able to leverage more bla bla bla. But i think at the very least this is a practical and good step in the right direction towards a more equitable society. In a sense, it would be some sort of safety net too.

TLDR: GOVT CAN HELP EVEN PLAYING FIELD BY HELPING POOR PEOPLE MONEY GROW AS FAST AS RICH PEOPLE MONEY SO AS TO CURB EXCESSES OF RICH GET RICHER (PROPORTIONALLY).

[[I wrote this at]]*|4:25 PM|