a fool and his money are soon...

...PARTED! I am by nature an easy-going person. I like to do things in my own time, unhurried and maybe dilly-dally when I can. However, when it comes to buying stuff, i am always in a hurry. I don't really know why. Yesterday i went out on another matter and along the way i saw this new baby shop opened along the coastal highway that a salesgirl from another shop had recommended to me in glowing terms. Once inside i was disappointed for i had been led to believe that this shop would have most products anyone would need for babies. This one was in fact poorly-lit and looked like a small shop. Behind the counter was a pleasant Malay lady and her 2 -year old daughter. I asked for breast milk storage bottles and she showed me what her shop stocked. I looked at her product and immediately knew that this wasn't what my wife had in mind when she asked me to buy some breastmilk storage bottles. But against my best instincts and seeing as there was nary a customer in that shop, seeing that lady and her little girl and that little shop, i was moved to buy something from her to support her little business. And so i bought the product and sure enough later that night my wife having examined and opened the package told me that she couldn't use it. The storage cups were too wide/impractical and the mouth wouldn't fit in with the breast pump she was using. Incidents such as these have happened to me before and yet i never seem to learn. I'm a lousy shopper, I admit. Only i hardly shop for stuff other than books for myself and some clothes come the Chinese New Year. I do not have the eye for good products but i do know instinctively when something is a bad deal. And yet i go ahead and buy it for all the wrong reasons. This made me feel really stupid and small last night. My wife told me that money was hard to earn and i couldn't agree more with her. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was a bad deal. Is it because spending money makes one feel good? Shopping for relief? I thought that only happened to women. I'm like a deer surrounded by lions whenever i go out in search of something to buy. Very bad decisions. I need the gift of discernment in this. It is a real puzzle to me why i do some things the way i do them. Human beings can be irrational but surely we learn from our mistakes? What the heck is the matter with me??

Sugar is bad for you so let's raise its price

The funny thing about the government's latest proposal to do away with sugar subsidies (over RM720 million a year to maintain the price of coarse sugar at RM1.45 per kilo) is that it was something i had expected after reading the news not less than a month ago, that former Sugar King Robert Kuok's Perlis Plantations Berhad had disposed off all its sugar making business/lands in Malaysia to Felda. I thought at the time that the government must SURELY let go of sugar price controls and let Felda raise the price of sugar. Otherwise, how was Felda going to make its sugar-making business profitable? After decades of controlling the price of the sweet stuff and not budging to even allow sugar manufacturers to raise prices by a lousy 5 sen, as soon as Felda gets into the sugar business the government gives the green light to raise prices all for the sake of our GOOD HEALTH. Now that the sugar business is in the hands of its offshoot Felda, the government will bend over backwards to accomodate them. For years and years sugar manufaturers' pleas to the government to allow them to raise sugar prices fell on deaf ears. But now, lo and behold, it is decreed that sugar is bad for our health hence raising prices will force Malaysians to consume less sugar. They even got the Consumer's Association of Penang people to come out in support of this proposition. Baloney. This is about the same kind of reasoning as the imposition of a RM50 service tax on credit cards to stop allegedly irresponsible/profligate spending amongst Malaysians. It is now confirmed by those in the credit card business that the RM50 service charge on credit cards will have NO EFFECT whatsoever on the volume and value of credit card transactions. Wither the government's justification for all these plain bullshit, scraping-the-bottom-of the-barrel-for money, desperado policies? You want money, go ahead and say it out loud. You need the money to waste on your hopelessly inefficient projects, to pay off your party warlords, to pay whomever has a hold on your scrawny little necks which i am sure lots of people do, judging by your lousy record and administration.
You need money cos it is never enough to pay off the trail of errors you are leaving behind with each mistake that you make. You need lots of money to stay in power. You're a bottomless greed pit for money which will never be enough for you to waste. Your shit don't stink but the money will cover the smell long enough for you to move elsewhere for your next dump. Good for our health indeed.

Cold Hard Cash is like PURE OXYGEN

Everybody is hungry for liquidity and there is not one banker/financial planner/insurance agent/unit trust manager/salesman/living breathing human being who will say no to cash and isn't lying at the same time, no one in his sane mind will say no to cash, the love of money is the root of all evil but NO ONE will say NO to cash. Recently i read in our local papers that a couple was caught feeding cut-off dollar bills into the bank's automated teller deposit machine. Their modus operandi was to cut a genuine bill in half and paste the other half using a photocopy fake bill. That way the teller machine can't tell the difference and accepts the deposit. If you had RM100, you could double it and so on and so forth. They were busted. Then of course there are the usual assortment of robberies (legal and ilegal), purse-snatching, drilling holes in the wall to rob a pawnshop, all sorts of shennanigans people get up to just to lay their hands on the cash. We NEED cash to live, no less than we need oxygen to breath. We need it to eat, to house ourselves, to put our little ones through college, to give our selves a decent lifestyle, to buy a car, to buy that branded hangbag for your wife so her friends will not look down on her (or not), we need cash and we can never have enough of it. So how come a guy comes along and tells us that love of cash is contrary to Heaven (see: Jesus Christ). I mean, if i don't get the cash i suffer for the duration of my life in this world. And when i die, i get to go to heaven as my reward (IF). So does that make me happy? I dunno. But let's not get righteous and take a vow of poverty just yet cos there are so many other things that one wants that one wants to get and the only way to get it is by cold, hard CASH. Jesus died on the cross what, when he was in his early 30s? i'm 40 now and earning very little, too little. I need to find a way to make cash and i need it badly cos cash equals freedom to me and my little family. Cash means i can buy a decent roof over my head for my little one and my wife. Cash means i can be independent and not take shit from whomever or whoever. If this sound selfish, it is. It SUCKS not to have cash and i need a brain overhaul now to turn me into a money-making machine just like the other chinamen in town. Why should this chinaman be any different? Screw the righteous. EVERYTHING revolves around CASH. Don't let nobody ever tell you otherwise cos they're lying through their teeth. If i can make a product that sells like hotcakes, i'd get to work immediately. I love Jesus, but i don't think that Jesus and money are incompatible. Not unless Jesus himself appear before me like he appeared before Thomas and told me in person that it's all bullshit and i should just live gladly like a poor righteous slob and wait for my reward in the afterworld. But Jesus is not going to do that so i need to work real hard to make the cash so that my life will take on a semblance of reality i can live up to. I need to snap the hell out of my stupid head dreams and start living like a real man. A man who makes money. Oxygen, for my little one, for my wife, for me. I am now officially a money-whore and i love it, so help me God.