Legs. In the Hokkien dialect, "kar" refers to legs. Shrug. Local joke

Anyway. Last week they announced a big revamp for bus services. This week it's the announcement of throwing S$20 billion dollars at rail.

Next week, they'll probably be talking about the car population. They have been having a policy of letting the car population grow at a targeted 3% per year. Last year, in practice, it was more like 9%. Given the space constraints in a small country like Singapore, obviously we can't have that going on forever. I'd be expecting measures like road usage pricing going up dramatically.

The defining moment of last night's Formula 1 night race in Singapore, as Ferrari's Massa drives away from the pit stop with his fuel hose still attached, and the pit crew runs after him

*This* peakoiler watches in amusement ...

Somone's going to get spanked for that.
Hope this is on youtube as I didn't watch the race

Here you go!

Sweet.
What a mistake. I am so glad I am not the guy who gave the green light.

Lowem, can you find a map of the route it took? I'm really surprised to see such a race in your city, especially at night. I mean, NOTHING is allowed in Sg, and now we see this!

Here's a nice one, complete with Flash animation :
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/nightrace/map.htm

Well, they said they absolutely wouldn't have any casino too and then now they are building two, halfway completed already.

They also said they would rule out nuclear reactors for power generation here, but then you never know.

Moral of the story? Never say never!

Well SGP's electricity comes mainly from NG, so nuclear may be an option that is sustainable somewhat longer.

I recently also learnt from a mate who moved (back) to Singapore that rubbish incinerators generate some of the electricity, but if we are looking at a future with less consumption...i.e. less rubbish...this might not be such a great way to generate electricity either.


What is the market over there in SGP like? Is it slowing like the rest of us? Heard that COE prices are coming down.

It's called Waste2Energy. I haven't really kept track of more recent developments but at the most it looks like just a handful of megawatts at the most.

It's a nice complement but obviously we shouldn't really think of it as large-scale baseload.

The government is trying to push for solar/wind but we peakoilers know the score. There are some goings-on and there could be a "Kyoto-be-damned" faction going for coal, but I really wouldn't want to see that.

Geographically, hydro is out and so is geothermal. We're left with nuclear. For large-scale baseload it makes logical sense. The only complications are politics and social acceptance.



COE prices are pretty volatile. I got mine around $12,600 for the Civic Hybrid. It dropped briefly below $10,000 in early Sep and it's now back up at around $14,000.

Back in Dec 2005, I wrote in to the government and said that we can't grow the car population at 3% per year forever.

Apparently enough people brought up this obvious point that somebody up there agreed and it has been announced that going forward, the allowed annual growth rate will be halved to 1.5% per year. Less COE's should mean that the price shoots up (demand/supply), but on the demand side, the worsening economy is slowing demand for new cars, so we've got these push-pull factors at work here.

As for the other markets, the stock market's a mess, we're dropping by 200-point intervals (from Oct 2007's 3800 down to 2200 recently). You can see for yourself here :

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^STI#symbol=^STI;range=2y

Not bad, eh?

Property market is dropping, especially on the high end. Public housing is not really affected - yet. It moves slower. But all in due time.

Thanks for that.
Heard the markets in Oz now are predicting a .5% interest rate cut next week. For being RBA that would be quite aggressive and a sure sign recessionary forces are in play.
Darn, looks like I might have a good opportunity for a redundency here and was hoping for a blooming SGP economy so I could snatch a contract there for a few years.
My wife is from there and is missing her family a bit.
Some say SGP is boring, but I have always enjoyed it there. And I love to makan makan at the hawkers, so I could probably get by quite cheaply.
cheers..Micki

UBS job cuts: UBS poised to lay off 2,000 staff 2 Oct 2008
Financial Times

I wonder how much money Dubai and the like are putting into our economy. It has to be a stunning amount. They're more confident in the future of the US economy than even JD.

Um. Wait. I'm a citizen and taxpayer. That's *my* money ....

Argh. Don't all these countries have better things to do with their reserves than to buy banks which everyone has discovered should be worth less than zero?

Maybe they have some kind of grand strategic plan or something, but at this point I sure don't see why they're throwing good money after bad.

The good news is that you guys have a supposed $330 billion sovereign wealth fund, which I imagine is where this money for the bailout (takeover) is coming from. The bad news: that estimate is from Morgan Stanley.

Is your SWF funded with taxpayer money? It seems like nearly all, if not all, other SWF's are funded with natural resource revenue, such as oil and gas in UAE, Kuwait, KSA, and Norway. But Singapore isn't the most resource-rich nation on Earth.

$100,000 a person is pretty damn good. Too bad you can't take out your share now, huh?

I'd argue that they're even more worried about their own situation.

If things turn Greater Depression over here, it will get ugly, no doubt. There will be riots. There will be hunger. There will be demagogues.

However, we will also be buying a whole lot less oil. And by "we", this will be the entire West. Prices will go down, and even then, we won't be buying as much. Oil states will be hurting badly.

Saudi Arabia, though, (as a fer'instance), has 28 million people on a land that couldn't sustain the 4 million it had less than 40 years ago. The population pyramid skews toward 16-25 year old males.

They will burn the mother****er down.