The Benelux Adventure

While most of my fellow Muslims celebrating hari raya, me and family have nothing better to do besides embarking another journey to unfamiliar side of the world, what I called The Benelux Adventure :). Benelux, the short form for Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, is very small in area indeed. It only takes 2-3 hours driving to reach the capital from one country to another. Our journey started from London and our base for the whole journey was in Lille, France.

Dover-Dunkerque

It is much cheaper to cross English Channel
through ferry services. We booked the Norfolk Line Ferry service via online and it cost us around 90 pounds per car for return trip journey. The journey from Dover (UK) – Dunkerque (France) took around 2 hours. The ferry surprisingly equipped with all sorts of facilities considering it is just a short trip ferry service. Feeling like I was in cruise ship vacation..hehe


Lille, France.

Lille is just 1 hour away from Dunkerque and the location has a considerable distance to Luxembourg, Belgium and The Netherlands. The accommodation is cheap as well and therefore picking Lille as our base for the whole journey was a practical choice. The city itself has many tourist attractions. Unfortunately,
we could only spend a limited amount of time visiting the city as our main objective was to travel around Benelux.

Luxembourg

Do you know Luxembourg has the highest GDP per capita in the world? Basically it means averagely Luxembourg’s citizens have the highest purchasing power as compared to the rest of the world. Anyway, Luxembourg is really tiny and the capital is just like an old European village. Frankly, the capital has nothing much to offer and the whole city tour only took around 1-2 hours to be completed.

Brussels, Belgium

This was my 2^nd visits to Brussels. What I really like about Brussels is the Gothic architecture that the city has to offer. It is really unique, a bit distinctive from regular European architecture.

Rotterdam & The Hague, The Netherlands

One thing that attracted me most was the cycling culture in the cities all over The Netherlands. There are parking for bicycles, road, traffic lights and it is just weird. Anyway, the weather here may enable them to ride a bicycle as a mean of transportation and definitely not feasible in Malaysia’s humid and wet weather.Rotterdam and The Hague is just 30 km apart from one another.Rotterdam is famous for its largest port in Europe while The Hague or Den Haag is the administration city in Holland just like Putrajaya in Malaysia. The large part of Holland has been reclaimed from the sea and this has led to the saying "God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.


I intend to share my experiences on my previous European adventures in my next blog. Those trips covered many more European cities such as (Part 1 - Berlin,Munich,Zurich,Interlaken, Paris, Amsterdam), (Part 2 – Paris,Bern,Venice, Frankfurt), (Part 3 Paris,Madrid,Lisbon,Barcelona). So for travel freaks out there, stay tune :).

The MAS way

I’ve had the opportunity to read the full report of MAS business turnaround plan, the MAS way, recently and it was well crafted and very comprehensive. The new managing director really put a lot of works to compile the whole report by identifying the core problems that causing yet another unprofitable year for MAS. The truth is, the faults are not entirely due to the weakness of management but MAS at the moment is not treated as a true business entity. Yes, MAS is a GLC and this somehow has put a lot of pressures to MAS to do the business as the normal commercial business usually does. Commercial business philosophy is simple enough – profit, profit and profit. But due to social obligations that MAS has to adhere, this has to be compromised. Flying to Buenos Aires, Vienna, Zurich and many more places just to carry the national flag for government’s interest even each of them is not-profitable route, is the most obvious example. The fact is, MAS has to bear all these losses in order to adhere to this social obligation. Even for domestic routes, MAS has to fly to remote places which commercially non-viable at all. Government should not interfere MAS if they want MAS to succeed. Let MAS decides which direction they should take based on commercial business point of views. It would be interesting to see MAS and AirAsia competing in domestic market if MAS is given the degree of freedom as AirAsia enjoying presently. Well, a good plan is just the beginning, execution and end-result is what really matter in the end.

Arab Co & Free Market

A free market examplary is not a definite free market after all. Protectionism is still required for the great American to counter a possible threat to their security. A recent takeover of P&A British Port Company by Dubai Port World from UAE means that the Dubai based company will be handling the operation of six major ports in USA. USA, a great champion and promoter of global free market economy in the end has to bow out to this unforeseen situation by delaying the port deal for a while. It was a UAE initiative by the way to allow some space for Bush Administration to convince the skeptical lawmakers. However, this will surely send a wrong signal to the whole world that the free market still needs intervention. Protectionism is somehow essential to secure the country’s interest. That’s why China won’t remove their fixed exchange rate system. The same goes to Malaysian government. That’s why France and Luxembourg are
countering the hostile bid for Arcelor by Lakshmi Mittal (apparently this guy is the third richest man in the world) to protect their country’s interest. Without some protectionism, the free market system is vulnerable to hostile and unexpected situations. Bank of England once had suffered billion of dollars losses due to fixed exchange rate exploitation by George Soros. Apparently, Malaysia was badly affected too due to large amount of foreign exchange reserves that we had in pound sterling. The depreciation of pound sterling costs us a huge USD $4 billion. How about the Asian financial crisis in 1997? You see, if United States blocks this port deal, we can simply say they are hypocrites. Free market never exists and it always be a conditional market or command economy.

Cartoon caricature of Prophet reflection

It’s been a couple of months now and the uproar of our beloved prophet (peace be upon him) cartoon caricature is still ongoing until now. How about Iraq war? Iran nuclear issue?? Never ending story of Palestinians and Israelis conflict?? So what is the reflection from all of these events really, not in the western point of view, but for us as a Muslim??

We are just hopeless. Yes, we are so weak and always at the mercy of West. Do all the demonstrations really help even our brothers killed in those demonstrations? A little I guess (one Italian minister quits from govt). Do the boycotts help? Probably a little (considering Arla foods company from Denmark lost 1.5 million USD/day). Do the suicide missions really effective? No, it makes the rest of Muslims suffering even more. All these things are the short term solutions to protest the West and we will always be at the mercy of West as long as we can’t reform our community. We have ourselves to blame for all the bad things that happened to us now.

Firstly, most of Muslim countries are so poor with uneducated population everywhere. It’s a tragedy really considering most of these countries have abundant of natural resources but still could not manipulate that god’s gifts to transform the country. As long as the country governed by the greedy leaders, we are nowhere to compete with the West politically, socially and most important economically. Look at Libya, only 6 millions of population with abundant of oil and gas resources but still, poverty are common to most population. I’m not suggesting that West is the best example to follow in order to prosper. In fact, the capitalist system founded and employed by them is really punishing majority of people in the world today. While Westerners are getting richer everyday, majority of Africans, Asians or South Americans are standing still economically or getting poorer. In addition, putting the West as an example would not lead us to total victory since they are the one setting the rules, the followers will always be the second best. We should not play by their rules, instead we should play by our own rules. However, neither am I suggesting that West is a bad example. There are certain good values so called Western values could be incorporated into our values. After all, Islamic empire flourished once by learning from Greek civilisation. During the Islamic Golden Age, we were the one prospered politically, socially and economically. One should note that the Islamic empire prospered while keeping the faith in religion intact. In fact, Quran and Sunnah were the inspiration of Muslims to prosper. For over 1000 years, sciences, philosophy, medicine, architecture, mathematics blossomed under Islamic empire. Al-kindi, Al-farabi, Ibn Sina, Al Khawarzimi, Al Jabr, to name a few, were all famous in their respective field. And now, Muslims are almost unnoticeable in every field. From economic point of view during the Islamic golden age, business oriented system was common where trading was the main driver for economy to prosper. And guess what, they prospered even by trading within the empire and without the foreign influences. So in today perspective, I’m pretty sure if we do business and trading heavily among Muslim countries, we all can prosper. That’s what cooperation means. After all, they are over 1 billion Muslims and 57 Muslim countries in the world today. Singaporeans prosper because they emphasise on human capital and they really capitalise their 4 millions population in every field even without natural resources to start with. We have the resources, we have over 1 billion human capital ready to be exploited in order to begin the Islamic revival. What I’m trying to say is we should look in our own Islamic perspective, what we have now, what we have achieved in the past, on how to prosper politically, socially and economically. Our past proved that we could do it. So there is no way it couldn’t be achieved again.

To gain a respect and claim our honour back is not at the mercy of Western world. We are the one should reform our community, educate our people, remove the greedy and idiotic leaders, have a 100% faith in Quran and Sunnah, strengthen our brotherhood, etc and etc, then we would climb back and regain our honour. Western Renaissance has made them prosper today, Islamic Renaissance now will make sure our future generation be respected and prosper. Western civilisation took almost 500 years to flourish as they are now. We still have hope and better to act now than never. Please stop this darken age of ours! And to all present and future leaders of the Muslim world, please and please, don’t look on how to get yourselves and people around you richer. Look after everybody please….

Take a break...

well, it's time to take a break for a while (even with no apparent stress at all..heh)....so we travel and travel..


Manchester City vs Charlton

Man City won 3 - 2 and wonderful Joey Barton goal by the way. I was suprised it was a full house night even with the lame visitor. No wonder EPL is a big bucks business.

and a visit to old trafford of course..oo...I'm not a fan of Man U!!

Edinburgh, Scotland - Surprisingly the most beautiful city in UK

Countryside, Scotland - on the way to Inveraray

and Glasgow, Scotland

owh, suddenly the small like ice cubes fell from the sky...weird haa..I thought it should be snowing..


Liverpool

The KOP & The Anfield legends!!Remember...you'll never walk alone............

Nation Performance

new day and new issue...I've been reading a lot on our economic performance lately and I got to say we have done pretty well up until this moment. World Economic Forum has ranked us 24th in terms of Growth Competitiveness Index for 2005 and the overall ranking:

Finland	1	5.94	1	à	0
United States	2	5.81	2	à	0
Sweden	3	5.65	3	à	0
Denmark	4	5.65	5	ä	1
Taiwan	5	5.58	4	æ	-1
Singapore	6	5.48	7	ä	1
Iceland	7	5.48	10	ä	3
Switzerland	8	5.46	8	à	0
Norway	9	5.4	6	æ	-3
Australia	10	5.21	14	ä	4
Netherlands	11	5.21	12	ä	1
Japan	12	5.18	9	æ	-3
United Kingdom	13	5.11	11	æ	-2
Canada	14	5.1	15	ä	1
Germany	15	5.1	13	æ	-2
New Zealand	16	5.09	18	ä	2
Korea, Rep.	17	5.07	29	ä	12
United Arab Emirates	18	4.99	16	æ	-2
Qatar	19	4.97	—	n/a	n/a
Estonia	20	4.95	20	à	0
Austria	21	4.95	17	æ	-4
Portugal	22	4.91	24	ä	2
Chile	23	4.91	22	æ	-1
Malaysia	24	4.9	31	ä	7
Luxembourg	25	4.9	26	ä	1
Ireland	26	4.86	30	ä	4
Israel	27	4.84	19	æ	-8
Hong Kong SAR	28	4.83	21	æ	-7
Spain	29	4.8	23	æ	-6
France	30	4.78	27	æ	-3
Belgium	31	4.63	25	æ	-6
Slovenia	32	4.59	33	ä	1
Kuwait	33	4.58	—	n/a	n/a
Cyprus	34	4.54	38	ä	4
Malta	35	4.54	32	æ	-3
Thailand	36	4.5	34	æ	-2
Bahrain	37	4.48	28	æ	-9
Czech Republic	38	4.42	40	ä	2
Hungary	39	4.38	39	à	0
Tunisia	40	4.32	42	ä	2

and as usual, Singapore is always ahead of us. After all Singapore is a developed nation. From my understanding, a developed nation enjoys a high living standard with high per capita Gross DOmestic Product (GDP). SO does UAE or Brunei is considered a developed nation just because they enjoy high per capita GDP?? No, I don't think so. Measuring GDP alone is not enough to declare them as a developed nation. Brunei and UAE is a good example of countries that enjoy high per capita GDP but overwhelmingly dependant on one source of revenue, which is oil.

The true developed nation must have sophisticated and diversified economy. One for sure their Services sector (banking, tourism, education, retail, etc) must be well developed as we can see in most developed nations. The developmental progression tends to follow this order...reliance on agriculture or natural resources (as our nation did from independence until late 70's)..then move on to manufacturing industry (as what is happening now) and later to service based economy. From my observation, we are heading towards that but the question is whether we could achieve it in 14 years time?? I think what the Government is planning now is really a logical move:

To strengthen our banking and financial system using the 'Islamic' attraction. The Islamic financial Hub will definitely attract large funds from Middle East if and only if our financial system is stable enough...to become a conventional financial Hub is really hard to do since there are so many established and stable financial system in most developed nations. The nearest example will be Singapore..so instead of competing directly, we should use our Islamic attraction to strengthen our service based sector. After all, the market is there..most of wealthy arabs invest their money in Europe and USA. So, the shift of this investment to our country will surely benefit us....

Next is Tourism...Tourism is the second largest contributor to our economy after manufacturing industry. We do have potential to expand this since our country has a lot to offer...unique culture, beautiful beaches and islands, breathtaking mountainous scenery , etc. Government has put a lot of efforts to promote our country, Malaysia Truly Asia...you can see it in EPL right :)???

Education is next...UK, Australia, USA, New Zealand is a good example that use education to strengthen their service based economy. I have to say we have a long way to compete but I can see many foreign students have choosen M'sia to further their study due to low cost and fair quality. Esp Islamic students. It's a good start anyway..

I have a lot to say in this issue..I guess I'll continue later....

Engineers/Scientists are losers?

To become a qualified engineer or scientist is not that easy. But do all the hard works to become one are really worth it? After all based on the following theorem...

taken somewhere:

Dilbert's "Salary Theorem" states that "Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives, sales people, accountants and especially liberal arts majors." This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two well known postulates:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.
As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time.

Since: Knowledge = Power,
then Knowledge = Work / Time,
and Time = Money,
then Knowledge = Work / Money.

Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge.

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done. so with knowledge approaches infinity, money aprroaches zero!!

haha...I think this theorem really does apply in the reality world we live in today..Give another 100 years, I bet there will be few engineers or scientists around :) if and only if they keep earning substantially lower than comedian such as jerry seinfeld or ray romano..

ooo..by the way, talking about knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity..I do admire some of them..The Dominator - roger federer, zinedine zidane, kobe bryant . ..well, these guys didn't help me directly or contribute anything to me but indirectly, they teach me something ..talent combines with hard work = the dominator!

roger federer is on his way to capture his 7th Grand Slam - Come on Roger!! Kobe Bryant just scored 81 points, the 2nd highest in NBA history and zidane - admire him a lot esp that exquisite goal in that champ league final

owh back to reality, got some works to do..later on next issue!

income distribution inequality

You think we have progessed so much for the past 20 years. Yup, no doubt about that and I'm glad we still progressing despite financial crisis that hit us in 1997. But do u know our nation ranks among the most unequal societies in Southeast Asia in terms of income distribution. Well get this:
only 10% from the population earn rm 5000 and above (and this group of course held majority of nation's wealth) and majority 60% - 70% only earn RM2000 and below ....considering cost of living in Malaysia steadily rising over the years, this people will face a very tough life just for living!!of course single folks won't feel anything but we talk about people with family to support here..statistic shows only 7% from population live in poverty (based on monthly earning of RM 5++), but come on....this can't be right, even with RM 1000/month with family to support will face a hard life...based on standard poverty measure, the real figure should be average income of population / 2...so I think RM 1000 is the right one...easy to say now almost 30% - 40% of Malaysian population still live in poverty...quite a shocker!!
while most of Klang Valley folks dress in stylish Armani, FCUK and drinks in high class starbucks, dome but they are still many and many people facing a hard time just to LIVE...sometimes it is unfair that only 10% of us get probably 70% of nation's wealth while 90% of us have to share remaining 30% nation's wealth...something to think about..hmmm