An Ant's Life

This is an interesting story about ants.

In a laboratory, there is a colony of black ants. The queen (purple) only produces black ants. They live peacefully within the colony.


Then one day, the scientist in charge of this colony introduces a red ant into the colony. This red ant is aggressive and strong. As part of nature, the black ants are inclined to repel the intruder. But as this red ant is aggressive and strong, it is able to repel any attacks easily.


Very soon, the red ant feel very comfortable about its new home. There is ample food for itself as it did not need to fight for every small bit of food which it used to do back at its red ant colony. It can easily bully the other black ants for food, and it earned the favor of the Queen ant as the Queen felt that this red ant is a foreign talent (FT). So the Queen granted the red ant a space in the colony.


One day the red ant disappeared. All the black ants are very happy that this intruder who had come and take away their "shine" is gone. Life can be back to normal again. But they are sadly wrong. The next day, they got a rude shock.

The red ant came back with two other red ants! Being part of nature, the black ants decide to repel the invaders. But as before, the red ants swiftly thwarted their attack, and left the black ants bruised and battered. The Queen is very glad however, as she feel that these new ants are strong and talented. She welcomed them with open arms, and decide to grant them a bigger space for accommodation. The black ants are naturally dismayed that not only do they have to work harder to find more food, they have to sacrifice some space for these red ants in a colony which is already very small.

The next day, even more red ants entered the colony and made themselves comfortable in this new place. Naturally, the black ants are unhappy and decide to repel these new intruders. But there are just too many of these strong and aggressive red ants that the black ants feel they have no chance against them at all. So they decide to launch a complain to the Queen about this, but it was swiftly put down by the Queen who praised the red ants as FT and are integral to their colony. Some of the black ants become disappointed and decide that it is time that they leave this colony to find life elsewhere as this colony does not belong to them anymore.


The next day, the Queen woke up to find almost half the black ant population gone, only to be replaced by red ants. And she wonders why.

A case of too much, too soon

Malaysia yesterday raised the prices of petrol nationwide by 40 percent and resulted in widespread unhappiness with the BN. This move is supposed to help Malaysia save billions every year in terms of subsidies which had kept Malaysian oil prices one of the lowest in the world. However, no doubt, this is a move that will incur the wrath of the common folks who felt they had their carpet pulled from under their feet. And at a time of rising inflation in all sorts of goods, having the price of this important commodity raised by 40 percent at one shot suddenly is like getting hit by a cyclone after getting hit by an earthquake.

This will no doubt be a big risk move by BN following their recent election loss, and in the short term, it will seem to be a outright suicidal move that could see a bigger shift in popularity to the opposition. However, if the central government is able to pull this off, I foresee that Malaysia's economy will do really well as the move will save it billions of dollars which can be put into its reserves to strengthen the economy and propel it to a more prosperous future. Otherwise, the situation can end up like the one which threw Indonesia into a turmoil about 10years ago, and most likely, "some heads will roll".

This makes me wonder why didn't the Malaysian government implement this in tiers instead of raising the entire 40 percent at one go? What I mean is that they could have raised the prices of petrol by 10 percent for a few months, and then another 10 percent and so on, instead of making citizens feel the full brunt of the price hike at one go? Or could this imply that 40 percent is the first tier, and further hikes are still on the horizon? This could be logical considering prices of petrol are still cheaper than in Singapore, and Singaporeans will still be willing to make the tour across the causeway to get cheaper petrol from the kind Malaysian government which has scrapped the plan to ban Singaporeans from buying petrol within a 50km radius from the border. Nonetheless, this was a necessary move that would become unsustainable as there seems to be no quick end to the rising oil prices.

Recent Happenings

Today is (today is not over yet, so I should use the present tense) a dark & gloomy day for Singapore football as it was humiliated by Uzbekistan 7-3 in the world cup qualifiers. That exposed a really leaky defense in Avramovic's team, but at least it showed that the attack was in existence as it managed to put in 3 goals against one of Asian football's giant. We'll just have to pull ourselves together in the next few matches to get a spot in the world cup. And meanwhile, we're like approximately 5days away from Euro 2008!

Got my university exam results a few days ago, and I am more pleased than I can ever be. Had a few mini-shocks actually. First was that I expected an A for my honours thesis, but only got an A-. Damn! But was really pleased with the B+ and B for Macro 3 and Econometrics 3 respectively, so I am really happy because the exam was so f*cked up that I thought I was going to get a C. Screw those foreign lecturers who can't teach properly, teach very little but set very difficult exams. Poor attitude I must say. They should have a screening procedure to eliminate bad lecturers, and send them home or maybe back to training school where they belong.
Haha I'm blasting them even though they gave me a much better result than I expected, but then I would have scored much better had they taught much better, and set exam qns which requires more intuitive thinking rather than qns that require you to memorise stuff and do simple but long & tedious calculations. Who the hell wants to calculate the roots of a time series equation manually when you can use a computer nowadays?! Geeez...

Oh and some days ago I saw this lady, no offence to her but is she brainless or is she trying to commit suicide? I couldn't figure, cos she brazenly stepped in front of an approaching double-decker bus to pick up a coin she dropped on the road. C'mon lady, I am not prepared at that moment to witness some bloody horror scene, and she made me had that urge to run forward to grab her off the road. But where're the brains I wonder. This reminds me of an analogy used by my lecturer, Tim Higgins, "picking up pennies in front of the bulldozer", a phrase he used to describe the guys from Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). Well LTCM provides for some interesting read if you search them up on Wikipedia. But I can now figure why that seems rather familiar at that moment....