iphoting's Sink

The fire alarm rang loud and clear, and yet, there was no announcement made. Given that this isn’t the first time it’d happened, I’m starting to lose confidence in the system’s ability to evacuation the population when an emergency situation occurs.

I consider myself rather lucky. I have World Literature essay and IOC due within two days of each other, leaving me with a very long National Day week to enjoy this well deserved break.

The unique trend in IB is that there’s always never a time where there isn’t any from of ‘important’ assignment due, be it CAS, EE, ToK, WL, IOC, IOP, Portfolio, Lab Reports, or anything you haven’t completed in time. It desensitises us from the stress of graded work as almost everything is graded. Still, this can be considered good training in building up resilience in students, so as to weather the trials and tribulations of the world that is to come.

Then, I’ll have my IOC on Monday, followed by the MoE Quality of Experience survey.

Today in Business & Management class, my teacher talked about the economics side of the world of Finance and we came to this concept of structural unemployment. Bingo! That’s the answer to what I’ve been looking for – a precise term for what the education system is.

I’ve come to a conclusion that the education system is an invention by the governments of time to solve the problem of structural unemployment caused by moving from a primary (agriculture, etc) to secondary (manufacturing, etc) economy. That is to discipline people to be mindless robots and very capable of rote learning, so as to fill the needs of a huge manufacturing sector. Manufacturing jobs before the advent of technology are just mindless repetitions, but even with technology, it’s still a mindless repetitive job requiring less labour and more skill.

Then the Berlin wall came down and the rise of the mysterious thing called internet, also know as the Information Age. It revolutionised the economy just like the way industrialists did during the agrarian age. However, there’s a slight difference. People undergoing the primary to secondary economic sector transition then had a clean mindset of freedom and creativity as they essentially run businesses and have to survive in a somewhat perfect competition market – they all sell grain, or they all sell cotton. To survive, they either had to produce more or just enough to feed their expenses. As for this secondary to tertiary transition, it’s more deadly for the ‘workforce’. Technology will replace labour in larger and larger numbers and labour required in the tertiary economy would require even more skills. It’s back to the beginning without a lot more people ‘not-useful’, which will help push down wages. Getting rich by working is barely possible, and will almost certainly take a very long time (short of striking lottery).

That aside, the pace of this interconnected world, thanks to technology, would move even faster and things can be done at greater speeds than before. The downside is that keeping up with changing technologies so as to stay relevant and employable will be an uphill task and tend to become impractical.

The solutions sadly, are never taught in the official school curriculum, making education less and less relevant in this globalised society. If things don’t change for the better soon enough, a whole new generation of people are going to be quite lost when they graduate, assuming the lack of self-directed learning. The tried and tested method, “study, get excellent grades, find a high-paying job,” is totally out-dated and following it blindly is in fact getting dangerous.

Ironically, this desperate hold over the old outdated paradigm contributes rather largely to the widening income gap in most capitalist economies, fuelling this self-fufiling prophecy, “the rich gets richer, the poor gets poorer”.

But of course, my opinions are just a tip of the ice-berg and I can imagine papers upon papers about this topic in your nearest and friendliest library, Google.

The last book of this Harry Potter series that I’d bought yesterday, I’ve finished reading. It draws up a beautiful conclusion with a tie up of all plots, very worth the money I’d spent on the book. So far, the waiting list to borrow the book stands at 1 person so far, I wonder how long it will go.

Thanks to the GST increases, I see my budgeting stretched through its limits. I’m almost broke now, but money will come in before I know nor ask for it.

SingNet, together with Google, has caused me to loose all my subscriptions in my Google Reader. So these days, I’ll probably not be reading anything as quickly as 2000 entries a month. Maybe a hundred max via manual methods. I miss my comics.

Tomorrow is known as Monday, I hope it’ll be a great day; I need to complete my third draft for this world literature assignment.

Yesterday, I had wonderful dinner with a couple of people whom I won’t mention. We crossed on many topics and here’s what Scott Adams managed to partially eavesdrop.

On my way home today, I was faced with a muffled announcement while I was waiting for a train at the platform towards the east, with a train stopped (or parked) in the opposite platform, with doors open and filled with people. A quick rough hearing said that there will be a service disruption for 10 minutes. To clarify, I decided to ask people around me, but to my surprise, none of them bothered to comprehend the announcement and continued standing along the platform.

Thinking that it might possibly be a technical problem, I decided to continue waiting since I had company with a friend, but minutes and seconds ticked by with the Passenger Display still showing 2 minutes to the next train arrival for the past 15 minutes, a second announcement came. The train in the opposite platform moved off. A second train in the opposite platform stopped and waited...but moved off too after a 3 minute wait.

Now that we’ve been waiting for the past 20 minutes, with boiling blood aided by the hot weather, something must be wrong. It wasn’t a nightmare as I wasn’t in ‘autopilot’ mode and we decided to go down to get a cab. Looking at it, with no announcement nor advice nor decent comprehendible information, it’s a big trap to continue waiting. After all, I’m guessing that announcement is just going to be just a ‘service disruption’.

At the gates, there is a huge crowd of people seeking refunds, questioning the station controller, and generally dissatisfied. Personally, I was pretty pissed with the SOP in handling such situations where people are still kept in the dark and continued wasting precious time waiting at the platform. No shuttle bus, no advice (nor information), just simply a street smarts test.

Off we went, for a cab home.

I’m so tempted to blast a letter to them, but I guess I won’t get any decent response; nor decent compensation given that the cost of travel is waived. SMRT’s SOP for such incidents is extremely poor, given their experience.

Today, I dropped by Borders with a few friends in our hunt for greater knowledge. I found this nice book, The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbrown. This shall be my initial foray into the world of economics, without the annoyance of examinations.

School ended at 1 pm for us today.

Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?

Your in-depth results are:

Slytherin - 12

Ravenclaw - 11

Hufflepuff - 10

Gryffindor - 8

Both my teachers flipped when they heard the announcements that class teachers are to shop for their class late-comers each morning. I’m guessing that the LDU is extremely brilliant, applying inconvenience to teachers so that they can, in turn persuade students to arrive in school in time for assembly (which might start a few minutes early at times, artificially inflating late-comer counts to meet assembly corps quota, which is a brilliant idea too).

These days (the end times, Matt 24:12), there’s a rise in antinomianism, the love of lawlessness, or a belief that Christians are released by grace from obeying moral laws (i.e. 10 commandments). “Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” is a clear declaration in Matt 7:21-23 that lawlessness is something that God detests.

Romans 5:20 is overly (mis)quoted as if it’s a license to sin, “But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more”. However, that is absolutely not the case as reading on, Paul exclaims (in Rom 6:1-2), “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?”.

It absolutely scares me when people say that the ten commandments are no longer relevant when Jesus said, “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfil”. After all, “the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient” (1 Tim 1:9-11).

Of course, there’s a whole few papers full of theology about the use of the law and what tutelage it brings, but I wouldn’t mention it here, as it’ll require too much biblical knowledge to follow and explain.

So in short, don’t sin with the help of the spirit that lives with us; and even if you do fail once in a while out of accident rather than intention, this is then where “sin abounded, grace abounded much more”. Be extremely weary when you hear (more and more) teachings of Cheap Grace, where ‘we are under grace and totally free from the law, guilt and condemnation and thus, there’s no need to follow the law’.

Hehe, enjoy the weekend! The clouds are really beautiful here.

Apparently, this guy is on the blogosphere news, again. What puzzles me greatly is what people are complaining about.

The (incomplete) story in short is that there’s this 2LT who ‘fired off an e-mail within the military network lambasting the “quality of leadership” in the SAF to the top brass, including the Minister of Defence and the Chief of Defence Force’ and “He had done it after being punished for an error that was largely not his”.

Ok. Case cleared, he emailed big shots after being punished for an error largely not his.

However, that’s not the main point I want to bring up. The main point which raised both of my eyebrows was that people in the blogosphere condemns him for doing such a thing, and are extremely unhappy about the fact that he didn’t get punished for complaining.

The highly amusing point was not about the things he’d complained about (which I usually agree with, here’s an opinion), but over his actions, which can be beneficial to everyone in the lower ranks of the system. And here, for speaking up, he gets condemned. Subordination is really an excuse for incompetence. If your superiors are competent, any complaints brought up to that level will be solvable. It’s only otherwise that one has to resort to other more drastic means.

This thus reminds me of Mr Wang’s post on the majority of people in the world (guardians) having a particular personality, and especially in Singapore, that refuses any form of changes to any system, regardless of the inefficiencies and deficiencies.

I’m also guessing that’s why the education system or any other for that matter can never be changed completely and properly for good. At best, improvements are just bolt-ons, band-aids.