There is a pretty temple smacked right in the middle of Kuching.
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[youtube]GTQnarzmTOc[/youtube]
Dear Stats Department,
I would like to request that you revert to your immediate previous design for your website. I find that that particular design as particularly friendly. It gave a no-frill experience for a majority of your visitors, whom I believe are there for the valuable statistics that you provide. Your department and your website play an important role in providing statistics to critical community.
The new design is awkward, cumbersome and noisy. Yes, noisy. My ears hurt. Your corporate song that is on autoplay is distracting and annoying. I want stats, not music.
I also do not want to know about your internal events and pictures of you awarding something to somebody. I do not want to listen to your director being interviewed in television.
I want numbers and graphs instead, and probably some analyses as well.
The only consolation I get is that you have removed the truly ugly 1Malaysia symbol from your banner. But hell, I will tolerate that if you just revert to your old design.
Please, please, at least switch off the autoplay for your music. This is the year 2011, not 1995. Having music on autoplay is so, so, last century, anyway.
Regards,
Your friendly libertarian.
I am still on the 1Malaysia email controversy. I must admit, this is starting to get ridiculous because its investment cost is only RM50 million. That is nothing compared to other big projects announced which on the surface and without being too ideological at least, are a-okay. For such a small project, maybe I am criticizing PEMANDU too harshly.
Nevertheless, I find the way the whole issue has been handled infuriating. Each piece of information makes me angrier: as it turns out, the email will cost the government RM0.50 per unit. It is not free, as it was promoted earlier.
A PEMANDU director justified the cost by stating it would save the government money. He compared the RM0.50 per unit cost to the cost of sending out actual mails, which is RM1.00 per unit.[1]
Saving or not, I am unconvinced that there is a need for that email, as with a lot of other Malaysians out there. Do we even need to pay for the RM0.50 in the first place, hence saving even more, if saving is a concern?
Another other concern — out of many unstated here — and the driver of this post is the director’s comparison of the RM0.50 per unit cost to the RM1.00 per unit of sending out actual mail. The director’s logic is completely sound, if each comparable actual mail is replaced by exactly one email and that there is no additional email sent out.
The 1Malaysia email at the moment however appears like any normal free email out there, except that it is authenticated. Supposedly, that is the main point. The question is, what if a person uses the 1Malaysia email for everyday use?
I typically send out between 5 to 10 emails per day. I receive even more daily. If I use the 1Malaysia email exclusively (I hate having multiple email accounts), these everyday emails will add to the cost of running the program.
Who will pay the cost of sending out email?
Also, there will be a breakpoint where saving turns into additional expenditure. The breakpoint will not be too big, which makes the chances of incurring additional cost highly likely. This is based on the assumption that the government typically does not send out too many letters to citizens. I personally have not received a letter from the government so far this year. In the previous years, if I am not mistaken, I received only one yearly.
Now, what if a spammer gets his hand on the account?
In short, I doubt this will be a cost-saving exercise. And again, who will pay for it?
[1] — Fadhlullah Suhaimi said he expected agencies to pay Tricubes about 50 sen per e-mail, cheaper than the RM1.00 printing, stationery, postage and dispatch cost of sending a regular letter.
He said that, as the per unit cost of regular mail might double to RM2.00 if a misaddressed letter was sent back on the taxpayer’s dime, the government stood to save between 50 sen to RM1.00 per e-mail.
”The poor taxpayer, without realising, is actually allowing wastage of RM2.00 per post that goes out,” Fadhlullah Suhaimi said.
He cautioned, however, that these expected savings were based on Tricubes’ own estimates. He said the actual cost per unit would vary depending on the volume and complexity of the transaction, as well as the number of people who eventually sign up. [Pemandu: Government agencies to pay for 1 Malaysia email database. Yow Hong Chieh. The Malaysian Insider. April 21 2011]
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[2351] PEMANDU’s GDP folly
The Najib administration intends to make Malaysia a high-income country and that alone with the end goal. Here is the problem: a project is supported not because it is viable, but because it increases the gross domestic product (GDP) — or the gross national income (GNI) depending on context — of the country.
The latest case in point is the 1Malaysia email, which the PM has said that it will increase the GNI by RM39 million… by 2015.[1]
Let me say that this is mindless. It is so because while it does increase the GDP, it will increase it only temporarily. Without viability, it cannot sustain economic growth and make permanent a state of high-income. The focus on the GDP is as good as a project producing a million toilet bowls just because it increases production and hence the GDP, never mind that there is no requirement them.
One commits to a project because there is a need or demand for it. It should not be done just for the sake of increasing the GDP and the GNI. These statistics are not financial statistics. They are macroeconomic statistics for good reasons. Do it for the sake of increasing the GDP frequent enough and soon business failures will be the norms. Given that the government is at the center of it, so too will be the events of bailout.
The GDP and the GNI are descriptive statistics, not prescriptive statistics like the way PEMANDU is using it. These macro statistics are descriptive because only organic growth are sustainable. Once one makes these macro statistics prescriptive, then we will get the nonsense like “a particular project contribute to the GNI by so and so ringgit.” We will get PEMANDU.
Financial statistics can be used prescriptively to ensure viability of a project. Macroeconomic statistics mostly do no such thing. The GDP, for instance, measures what have been spent and says nothing whether a project should be invested in or not. Dig a hole for RM50 million and fill it again for another RM50 million, then the GDP will increase by at least RM100 million. The question whether that action is productive cannot be known through the GDP.
All the more outrageous is that the 1Malaysia email project is projected to contribute RM39 million by 2015 to the GNI. Ladies and gentlemen, the GDP of Malaysia for last year was more than RM600 billion. That is RM600,000 million, just in case the contexts of million and billion need clarification. The GDP numbers are so big that they are usually rounded up to the nearest billion. RM39 million will not typically register in any general statistics.
Yet, the 1Malaysia email project’s celebrated point is its contribution to the GDP.
That is a good joke.
My suggestion is this: take out the reference to individual projects’ contribution to the GDP.
[1] — This is followed by the RM250 million investment by Pensonic Holdings Bhd to build its manufacturing hub and international distribution network over 10 years. The project will see a GNI impact of about RM500 million and create 850 new jobs by 2020.
The third project comes under the Malaysia Administrative Modernisation and Management (Mampu), which will invest RM3.26 million to improve the electronic services provided by the government and is expected to create 155 jobs.
The fourth project will come under the communications content and infrastructure national key economic area. It involves Tricubes Bhd, which will invest RM50 million, to develop a web portal for all Malaysian citizens above the age of 18 by 2020.
The 1Malaysia email project is expected to contribute RM39 million in GNI by 2015. [7 new ETP projects with RM901m in investments. Roziana Hamsawi. Zaidi Isham Ismail. Business Times. April 20 2011]