Just some of my personal opinions. I have to say I am a little bias. I don’t think people below 28 years should be an election candidate. I believe they should serve in the grassroots or town councils for a couple of years first, because thats the only way to truly experience the ground. I watched the video 3 times. On the first glance, Nicole Seah seemed like a very angsty youth. Something like a JC counsellor type with a prepared speech. Some of the points she raised are rather superficial, such as the ‘fear’ of PAP, wealth of Singapore belongs to Singaporeans, foreigners in public areas and basically all kinds of emotional topics. These are the kinds of topics where uncles sitting around in coffee shops will discuss and rant. There seems to be quite a fair bit of false emotions, used for the purpose of rousing the crowd. This is especially when she goes from loud strong voice to giggles and smirks. But I would say her presentation skill to drive emotional points across is good, as well as her well prepared speech. Running through the sequence of her speech, she started by saying this election is not about the renewal of PAP, or any other party, but it is for Singaporeans to stand up and choose what is right for your country. A very good opener I would say. Her next point is that PM Lee said that the elections is not ‘masak masak’, and then she mentions how NSP understands that and doesn’t change team members on the whim, unlike PAP which did a last minute swap of candidate in Tampines and Tanjong Pagar. Quite a frivolous point in my opinion, but it does rouse up supporter’s emotion. Nicole then mentioned that she read the PAP manifesto and that PM Lee said that voters in wards won by opposition cannot expect the same improvements promised by PAP. I went to look at PAP’s manifesto and I couldn’t find it, although I would admit...
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Social media truly is making a large inevitable impact in our lives! For those of you still living in a cave (in Singapore at least), it is the start of the General Election 2011, or simply known as the GE2011. The Singapore Parliament was dissolved on 19th April 2011. After that, the nomination papers were open for collection, and the official nomination was held on 27th April 2011 11.00 am to 12.30pm. Amazingly, there were actually a few forms that were filled wrongly and disqualified. I wonder how hard is it to fill the forms. Maybe I’ll just go collect the forms as an independent candidate then use the papers as waste paper? From tomorrow, Thursday 28th April 2011 onwards, there will be election rallies held at numerous locations nationwide where people will attempt to share their view of the future, to rouse up emotions, and to show you why they are your best choice. Simply said, they are there to win your votes, by hook or by crook. However, back to my main point, social media is proving to be a much bigger tool in order to rally troops from the ground. With a click of a finger, information on a candidate (public or otherwise) can be dug up. A very interesting website is the GE2011 swarm tracker. Basically, this is like your google trends and twitter trends, combined into a visual form to show how certain GE2011 related keywords are being searched and which is the hot topic. To be honest, theres not much use in the raw data available, but perhaps it will show a trend for those data crunchers. I have always liked to play with google maps. The sheer amount of data available and the ways that data can be put to use is just amazing. In this case, a brilliant guy put in the effort and came out with the Singapore electoral map boundaries for GE2011. Basically using google maps as the base, he entered in data for...
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Not sure who’s the real author of this, but it’s quite a layman way of explaining tax and it’s effects. Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this: The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1. The sixth would pay $3. The seventh $7. The eighth $12. The ninth $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59. So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.” So, now dinner for the ten only cost $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So, the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six, the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share’? The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being ‘PAID’ to eat their meal. So, the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so: The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings). The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings). The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings). The ninth now paid $14 instead...
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April is the month where we pay our dues. That’s right! It’s time to file our income tax! For Singapore this year, the deadline is 15th April 2011 for paper filing, and 18th April 2011 for e-filing. Besides people who are not very savvy with computers, everybody should be doing electronic filing via the IRAS website! As always, there is the tax calculator provided by IRAS. Main thing to note is the 20% one off personal tax rebate this year. Yay! There’s going to be a change of tax bracket for next year’s income tax. From the table of changes, it benefits all tax payers, but the biggest benefit goes to the middle income earner. (ie, the $40k to 160k per annum chargeable income range). Another new feature this year is the estimated tax payable after you finished your e-filing. Previously, when you filed your taxes, you won’t know how much you gotta pay, until you get the tax bill. Now, they have it displayed so that you won’t get a shock later. My company is in the auto-inclusion scheme. So basically all the details are already electronically submitted to IRAS. On top of that, I was actually in the no-filing service. This means, I don’t even have to e-file. However, I had to include some new reliefs. I believe we should not evade taxes. But on the other hand, we should always try to minimise our tax bill legitimately using legal methods provided for in the system. The most common ways is through incorporation of a business, and claiming of reliefs. Incorporation is probably only for the self-employed with high cash flow, else it wouldn’t make sense anyway. For individuals, we should always know what we can claim in reliefs. Aside from parents/child/sibling/NS relief, the most common 3 for the working employee is course fee relief, donations, and SRS contribution. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the government just increased course fee relief to $5500 per annum! That means if you attended a...
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