Perspective

The world or at least the western world seems to be having a mass frenzy of self examination about the environment. The young girl that seems so angry about everything and is blaming big business (or so it seems to me, but it could as well be grown ups generally) for ruining her future is embarrassing large global enterprises into having a more eco-friendly corporate policy. It seems to be working (the embarrassing bit, not sadly the actual impact on anything bit) at least in the UK where all political parties are promising zero carbon this and that by what seems like the middle of next week if the electorate just vote for them at the 12th December general election. This is all just fine as I believe that the world is in an environmentally sticky position and something needs to be done. It's just that perspective is massively missing and the action is being focussed on in all the wrong places.

Now I don't want to sermonize, rant or moralise about things, particularly the rights and wrongs of the whole environmental question, but it does seem to me that turning off lights or no longer using single use plastic bags doesn't really help much despite what the media and environmental activists may say. This isn't a popular position to have but I recently found someone that agrees with me. Here's an excerpt (read the whole thing here):

But we aren’t very good at thinking about scales and proportions. In general, I think, we assign things a value of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and bracket them all together in those two categories. For instance, we feel good when we take a bag-for-life to reduce plastic bag use. But you can make 1,000 bags for 6kWh, while boiling a kettle takes about 0.1kWh, so you could make 16 plastic bags for the energy cost of just one round of tea.

From a purely climate point of view, your plastic bags are largely irrelevant. Reducing plastic waste is also good, of course, although again, Western countries account for a tiny fraction of the ocean pollution we worry about — almost all of it comes from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, in fact.

This last comment caught my eye for as someone spending a lot of time in Penang, Malaysia, I see the evidence of this every day. The above article redirected me to the underlying statistics (see here) from the Our World in Data website from which I found a whole raft of data supporting this position. Basically, if nothing changes to the way in which pollution of all sorts is made, anything done by virtually anybody in the West is simply a rounding error.

Now...

... and projected

What a dismal prospect and I will leave you with this additional factoid:

None of this is meant to make you stop taking care over the small things: look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, as they say. There’s nothing wrong with stopping using plastic bags, although you need to be very careful that you don’t lose your cotton bags-for-life, since they use about 100 times as much energy to make.

Keep your perspective.

Moving East

One of the big upsides to spending time in Penang is its proximity to other Asian countries, SE and otherwise, that we've never been to. I'm pretty sure that if you drew a circle with Penang as its epicenter that was 3 1/2 hours away, you'd get a pretty large chunk of this part of the world and its population.

The red circle is 3 1/2 hours, the blue circle is 5 1/2 hours with the arrow showing Penang

I met a guy who is a pilot for Boeing, living here but working out of Singapore, who retired from Cathay Pacific and a mainland Chinese airline and he told me the reason he went to work for the Chinese airline after Cathay was (OK money was a biggie) that the region was exploding in terms of the airline industry. 5 hours from Hong Kong were 2/3 of the global population, many of whom had never flown before but with the explosion in economic growth in the region would certainly pretty soon want to. This was the big draw and it turned out that way, except more.

That's a lot of Asia.

It has been the Emirati airlines from the UAE that appear to have made most splash in recent years (along with the Chinese of course) with the impact being a distinct tilt to the East from the previously dominant nations of the West.  Of course these airlines are massively subsidized by the respective emirates so the established airlines that are listed and intent on profitability (mainly in the west) are crying foul play. True of course but the respective nations have made their decision that this is the way they are going.

Etihad's route map from its website

It is one of the (many) things on President Trump's list of complaints about unfair play from overseas to the detriment of the US and I wouldn't be surprised if some form of actions are being taken certainly in the west to curb the global spread. However much that happens though has no bearing what happens in the rest of the world where people don't much care about competitive disadvantage, having been on the receiving end of it for so long. I expect the easternisation to continue.

Besides... and this a big besides... these airlines are way more comfortable, set out and with better service than any number of American airlines that I can mention. Fleets are newer, better seats, nicer flight staff... A great analogy is one of Grace Slick's from Jefferson Airplane who included a line in one of their songs "I don't care if there are preservatives in it so long as my lettuce is crisp". Nicely said Grace!

For us though it opens up a massive new series of opportunities for travel seeing as both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore are major airline hubs for the world.

Looking forward to seeing more!

Plus Ca Change, Penang Style

The Far East is the most populous part of the world by a distance. Something like 60% of the global population are near by, well relatively nearby so one of the things that happens is that the cost of labour is cheap. Being someone that does economics for a living, I remember reading that globally there are only 2 billion jobs. Given the population size this means that nearly 50% of all working age people are either unemployed or under-employed so little pressure on businesses to pay up for staff.

That is noticeable here in Penang. The island has 750,000 people and is of relatively small size so is very busy and crowded but also that means lots and lots of low paying jobs away from the factory complexes which are very high tech indeed (Pharma, Tech, Chips, etc) so require highly trained white collar skills as well as the command of English. Away from this salaries drop precipitously and you can see that with jobs that simply wouldn't exist in the west, here there are always people and in many cases multiple levels of back up for that job.

I am completely OK with this as I follow the trend of robotisisation (if that's not a word, it soon will be) and the use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance tech solutions even though I don't necessarily agree with it all as people do need to work for a living. What would they do if there no jobs? Nothing good I suspect.

I met a guy here recently who manages his California IT business from just down the road. OK that's nothing special I know as many people do that these days but its what he does that blew me away.

If you remember the last two Jason Bourne movies, you may remember that on at least two occasions the CIA trackers were trying to find him by hooking into local CCTV networks remotely from wherever it was that they were located and by communication links directing their trackers to find Jason. That was managed by people so even though it took seconds in the movie, that was pretty darned inefficient according to this guy.

Imagine now that you want to do that and you harness the power of AI into the loop. Ditch the people watchers and replace them with a computer image that you have of the person you want to track. And then do it globally. Apparently once you do all of this correctly it now takes less than a nanosecond to find whomever it is that you want to find. Anywhere in the world.

Unsurprisingly law enforcement agencies from all over the world are buying this technology and adopting it. So this computer nerd from the 1970's is now an AI superstar with killer technology that everyone wants. Forget about the intrusion into your personal life. See what this wonder technology can do! I told him that this was 1984's worst nightmare come to life. He laughed. Thanks!

However that world has not made it here yet. Well not entirely anyway. There's a wonderful taxi service here called Grab, a Singapore start up and a competitor to Uber which is also here. As the local taxis are dreadful, both these guys have killed the licensed taxi industry. The service is very fast, very cheap and the people that drive the cars are happy to use this for a second job. We have used both frequently and both are fantastic. We have also met some great local people, all friendly, all inquisitive on their side too.

One young man we met in this way said that his lifetime career ambition was to own his own hawker stand selling the best chicken rice. We asked him his recipe and he said he would be learning from a chicken rice sifu and go from there. Talk about life aspirations but typical of here and I imagine typical of this highly populous region. AI won't have much luck competing with this young man I hope.

The original purpose of this post was something different but clearly I had that other stuff on my mind too! We are just settling in here and have moved into an apartment where we wanted some work done. Nothing major, just putting in a sink and cabinet. Sounds simple but just as anywhere else as soon as you start off with a contractor, he says well if you want that, you'll have to do that and that will be more expensive. Sound familiar? Anyway we agreed on a price way more than we expected and the works to do and the cabinet installers have just been in and I have to acknowledge they did what looks like a great job. The cabinet has a lovely new cabinet smell too.

The various stages of work

So I went in the room where they were working and found a crew there. Maybe 6 or 7 guys. Two were on their phones looking at videos and giggling, one guy the boss had his back turned and was tapping away vigorously on his phone, another two were generally milling around and the one sole guy was doing all the work.

Some things really do not change!