Delving into the Malaysian Chinese psyche

I turned the bottle of french table rouge upside-down and shook it like the contents of a milo drink-to-go before realising what i'd done. Anyway, too late. i uncorked the vino and we finished it within the hour - me, mostly, doing the honours. I haven't had rouge vino in quite a while now, so the feeling of drunkenness felt good.

Earlier yesterday (it's past midnight now as far as i can tell) i had lunch with the boss and a client and some bankers. the client was a fellow-countryman and he spoke candidly (as was his style i have come to appreciate) about how he makes his pile. Stocks and properties, he opined, were what made a man rich. You bought property in prime locales where tenants line up for letting, and no matter how expensive it was, you'd got yourself a winner. Or dividends from stocks. Which was pretty decent and honest of the towkay to share with us, i thought. And to think that before this i had thought him rude. It appears now that i'd been too sensitive.

Malaysian Chinese businessmen/entrepreneurs have gone a notch up in my ladder of respect, offically, as of today.


And i ain't lying.

Malaysia's Nuclear Conundrum

By 2022 when my daughter will be about 13 years old, Malaysia, barring a change of government or a reversal in policy (which isn't altogether improbable given our government's track record), will have built two 1,000 Megawatt nuclear power stations. Which state/s will play host/s to these babies is anybody's guess for now but the decision has been taken. Wind, hydro, solar power are too expensive, it seems. And somebody has to make sure that our ever-growing energy needs are met in the future. I'm opposed to nuclear power in principal but more to the point i'm more worried about whether we have the ability to maintain nuclear power plants. We're a laid-back people and generally speaking aren't too technologically-inclined notwithstanding the government's heroic efforts to drag us kicking and screaming into the industrial age (well, now we're into the post-industrial age so you have an idea of where we stand globally). Nuke plants under the supervision of advanced countries, nay, superpowers such as the United States and the old Soviet Union have had unfortunate incidents - the three mile island and chernobyl fiascos, respectively. And these are BIG countries. You can put many many Malaysias into either superpower state. And there is the million megawatt question of where to ship nuclear wastes, the waste products of generating nuclear power, to. Unlike some countries with realms far and wide spread all over the globe, we aren't blessed with great geographic spread at least not of the kind big enough to keep civilians well out of the range of a nuclear fall-out/dump. Maybe i am sounding a little pessimistic here. We can do this, they say. I sure hope they're right and i'm wrong.