Sybreon Ones Nought

I wonder which idiot in our government came up with the dumb idea of taxing all credit cards in the country. According to the recent budget reading, beginning next year, all credit cards in Malaysia will be taxed RM50 annually regardless. The lame excuse is to help reduce debt by taxing credit cards but I have no idea how taxing credit cards helps reduce debt in any way.

Firstly, the tax is flat across all cards – regardless of whether you hold a platinum, gold or regular card. Then, the tax is flat across all users – regardless of whether you are in debt or otherwise. In fact, those people in debt are going to worst hit. Being unable to settle their debts, they would not be able to cancel their excess cards and will end up incurring even more cost with this crazy tax.

Then, let us talk about the damage to the banks. Everyone knows that banks make a lot of money off these credit cards. With people canceling their cards in droves, banks would lose millions in revenue next year. I doubt that the banks would take this lying down. In fact, my colleagues have already been informed by their banks to hold-off their cancellations first while they try to sort this out with the government.

Anyhow, I seriously hope that my bank decides to absorb any card tax, just like how they absorb the annual fees based on the amount of transactions made on the card. The banks earn between 2%-5% off all my card transactions. I pay almost everything with card these days. So, if they can make enough off my card transactions, they should be able to absorb this tax easily.

I have just come across a really useful tool called ditaa. It is a command line tool that magically converts text diagrams into graphical representations. This comes in really handy for code development purposes as diagrams are often documented within source code as text. I have been playing around with it and it seems to works as advertised. The only issue that I have found is that I cannot control the size of the fonts. Otherwise, it is really cool. I plan to use it to document my next processor architecture design.

After lunch at work, all the members of our entire division were hustled into the auditorium for a talk on ethics and integrity. Regular readers of my blog would know that I have this issue with the belief that there is anything resembling an absolute moral code. Therefore, I had a few issues with some of the things that the speaker said but generally, it was okay. In fact, I did learn a few things about ethics and integrity from the talk.

Our official hours are between 8.30am and 5.30pm. The speaker gave the example of an employee who comes to work regularly at 8.45am and returns at 9.00pm with the argument that he is more productive later in the day. The speaker then asked us if this thing that he did was right or wrong. Personally, I think that the question is malformed. However, he told us that this is a wrong thing to do because the official hours are as stipulated. If someone does not like working for a company with fixed hours he could always opt to work for one with flexible hours instead.

Lesson 1: Do not work after hours even if you are more productive then.

Next is the acronym AIDA that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. The speaker claimed that the talk that we had was just the first stage of change – awareness. All the points that he had raised and everything that we had discussed at the talk, was for creating awareness. We would need to raise interest, desire and translate things into action. I remarked to my colleagues that these were the exact rules for attraction. Make someone aware of our existence, raise some interest, desire and then act.

Lesson 2: Management principles apply just as readily to courtship.

I have been keeping track of the fuel-consumption of my car ever since RON95 was introduced into the system. I began my measurements about two months before switching over to the new fuel. The method used is similar to the one used before. The results are both anecdotal and empirical. The RON95 fuel is more fuel-efficient than the RON97 fuel was before. This is illustrated by the chart above – the bars on the right are generally higher than the bars on the left.

So, there is no real reason to pump the RON97 fuel anymore. The RON95 fuel costs 10% less and delivers about 10% extra efficiency.

Thought this reddit alien is cool.

A personal selection of my photo-art. Enjoy.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

NO BALLS

At the very least, Samy Vellu has the support of his delegates. Ong Tee Keat cannot even claim that. Our next days will be very interesting. Let us all get the pop-corn out and enjoy the sandiwara that is to come. Chua Soi Lek’s people are most certainly not going to take this rebuff lying down. Neither is our dearest PM. MIC is already largely considered a liability and a pariah within BN.

If MCA becomes another one, the BN coalition will suffer badly. Just take a look at how many parliamentary and state seats that MCA controls. All it will take is for Johor MCA to hold an EGM and vote Ong Tee Keat out as their state-level head. That would send shock-waves through to the whole of BN. The once safe BN strong-hold of Johor may not be the haven that most BN leaders have come to expect.

History may one day write that the downfall of MCA was brought on by the two Ongs. Massive FAIL!