Thursday, April 2, 2015

Humour Is In Short Supply

On April Fools’ Day Google’s various divisions outdo themselves by creating more practical and impractical jokes than any other tech firm. This year they have Pac-Man mode for Google Maps on desktop and mobile. Fire up Google Maps, check the clues, and search for a place where you think Pac-Man might be. The streets are your maze, while Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde are your enemies. The joke is less funny in Singapore because the enemies are ERP gantries and the astronomically high cost of a Certificate of Entitlement (COE).

And it's definitely not an April Fool joke when the Government announced that over 800,000 Singaporean HDB households will receive $45 million worth of Goods and Services Tax (GST) Voucher – Utilities-Save (U-Save) rebate in April this month. The humour is in the line about GST not being regressive, spewed by same big mouth who said an integrated resort is not a casino. You know the on-going joke, they give you a hundred dollars, they take away ninety-nine.

Malaysia introduces GST this month, but at least they have a list of tax exempt items to soothe the pain:
  • RON 95 petrol, diesel and LPG fuel,
  • Essentials like rice, sugar, salt, flour, cooking oil, coffee, tea, poultry and fish, 
  • Public transport (LRT, KTM buses),
  • Sale and rental of property,
  • Books and reading materials,
  • Healthcare and dental services

BTW the 6% GST is not an additional tax, it replaces the Sales and Services Tax (SST) of 5 to 10 percent. That's the difference between Malaysia and Singapore.

The bigger reason for not laughing is when a grassroots leader is still running free, threatening to maim a boy's manhood for having the cojones to speak the hilarious truth. Nobody is wasting time to file a report because the greater joke is that the Singapore Police Force (SPF) will probably work as efficaciously as they did in pursuing the 2011 case of Young People’s Action Party (YPAP) member Jason Neo. That's the fellow who posted a photo he had taken of a school bus occupied by Malay children from Huda Kindergarten, and captioned it “Bus filled with young terrorist trainees?” Surely that's not funny, right?

9 comments:

  1. Please call them "integrated casinos" rather than "integrated resorts".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not funny at all when you have a partisan SPF. I wonder why no one is openly or actively questioning SPF for these 2 cases? Maybe a petitioning of the Minister of HA or AGC is in order?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Are you suggesting a Committee of Inquiry into how SPF decides who to arrest?

      Delete
  3. white jokers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. PRC AStar "scholar" poisoned her fellow PhD students in Standford U, after sabotaging their lab work, quietly hidden from MM. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singaporean-a-star-scholarship-holder-charged-with-poisoning-classmates-in-the-us-021217873.html

    And in case you missed, admin service oppicers promoted this year: 73... more and more money in the pockets, more and more committees to coordinate inter-ministries turf wars, spend more time bitching, fixing opposition, less and less time in their job to serve the nation. that is why budget has to go up and up,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The scary part about this story is that the scholars who didn't get caught are promoted to head various ministries as perm secs and what nots. Some even make it to minister level. This is no laughing matter, this legacy of the tyrant who equated talent with monetary rewards.

      Delete
  5. They insist calling the casinos integrated resorts but yet they wouldn't even allow one of them to provide free shuttle service to ferry the integrated families over. Can anyone see their hypocrisy ?

    On the other hand that young amorous 17-year old teen was honest enough to call a spade a spade. No need to beat around the bush to get the message across. Everyone seems to be laughing at Singapore now. They staged a world class to show the glory of one dead man only to have that image shattered within seconds after his funeral.

    People will bound to find out the honest hard truth if they repeat telling a lie one too often. The moral of the story is that certain things in life one cannot afford to be too cunning or calculative, otherwise it will backfire.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Integrated casinos ... not resorts.

      Delete
  6. As soon as LKY is dead, we sinkies became the laughing joke in democracy and civil rights. Watch only if you have a good sense of humor.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnbNT0MlzC4
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8rWuHylEBw

    ReplyDelete