Covid-19 and the new normal, and the same people more or less

1. It's week 5 of the lockdown. The world has changed at so many fundamental levels, that is the accepted datapoint, but has it really?
2. In the past 5 weeks, these happened: 
3. At a global level (i) US under Trump has been exposed like the incompetent leader that he is, the UK is not too far behind. (BoJo, sorry for your Covid-19 affliction, sir, but your country is in really bad shape now); (ii) China has taken charge of the narrative from being the source of the virus through unhygienic and questionable dietary choices; to leading the world to how to handle a crisis and extending soft power diplomacy to many developed / developing nations in dire need of help, (iii) the rise of pharmas, biotechs and VC tech companies to combat the dangerous and cunning virus (iv) healthcare delivery systems in developed worlds overwhelmed by Covid cases;
4. At a national level (i) schools / universities closed down and students intakes for next year to traditional establishments has been cast into uncertain limbo, not to mention teachers taking on additional workloads (ii) SMEs getting severely and adversely affected by the lockdown - at least 6 weeks and eating into traditionally high retail seasons (iii) businesses pausing and restrategising where the world is headed to - a digital transition where applicable, (iv) adjusting to possibility of further economic impact in a world of intermittent lockdowns (v) financial stimulus opportunities abound.
5. Nationally, any politicking is on pause. Which is a benefit.
6. At family levels, the salary earners will need to consider how to bring in the dosh. How best to adapt in this strange, unpredictable world.
7. Commentary is only there for therapeutic reasons - it is a world that appears to need to be rebuilt brick-by-brick.
8. Some thoughts, just for posterity:

• Care protocols for Covid-19 is being updated almost daily, and the US due to the sheer case volume is unfortunately, the best place to research.
• Vaccine development is just so far away - as it stands, only Moderna's first RNA solution is entering into Phase 1 in, I don't know, the first 2 patients? Even in best case, it will be 12 months away, notwithstanding potential manufacturing bottlenecks to do method transfer of its new process manufacture. And without a vaccine, the physical distancing measures is the only way to prevent continual recurrence of the outbreak that can overwhelm hospital care capacity in a matter of weeks.
• With intermittent lockdowns appearing to be a new status quo in the near to mid-term future, the economic effects will not be sparing but can only be mitigated. Without an adaptive solution, we will not be prepared.
• Obvious solution is extensive detection (rt-pcr) and immunity (serological) testing and contact tracing. Our execution capacity to do this is questionable - even in the best cases scenario as proposed by some very brash voices, I doubt we will be able to do this at scale.
• The benefits of convalescent plasma arising from serological tests appear to be lofty ideals at the moment - do we have the scale for purification and acceptance at our end at the economic costs we have? Is it still cheaper to do with primary care and ensuring our capacity is not overwhelmed at the most dangerous spikes?
• The economic impact is one where the biggest opportunities will lie. There is an abstraction of needs that will probably be filled by the Apples and Googles, but the need for a local solution I believe will be overwhelming. 
• Digitisation of verification, processes, marketing, conferencing; medical devices and solutions that enhance efficiencies of healthcare delivery systems are almost inevitable in the shortest possible timeframe. The introduction of these solutions at a freemium initiation and building up loyalty over the next difficult phase of the Covid fight will probably be the best position.

9. By the way, people won't change. There will still be brash loudmouths, spin doctors and various aggravating people, Covid or not. That part of the world won't change.
10. I should change for the better. If anything, to have a cunning, invisible, microscopic piece of single-stranded "organism" causing this much havoc on the planet is extremely humbling. If only the world takes heed.

The new(er) old Malaysia

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/03/the-guardian-view-on-a-royal-coup-a-king-overturns-a-historic-election

Not often I read something from the Guardian I disagree at so many levels, but this is something else. This just fails to accept how the system works here in Malaysia and instead brings voice to create a deep mistrust with the King, and the larger issue of democratic practice in Malaysia.

Let me break it down -
1. The King
The situation of a reigning PM resigning (sorry - couldn't resist) in a backdrop of a realigning coalition was unprecedented and was a test of the robustness of the constitutional monarchy that the Brits exported to us. (Note: Yes you Brit yobs, thanks but on second thoughts.. why were you here in the first place?) It wasn't like Tun M was resigning and passing it to the present ruling coalition, it was a ruling coalition that was getting replaced with the expectation that Tun M was to continue as the leader of the new coalition, and he was resigning. The question then becomes - who is in charge and who has the majority support of the elected reps?

That was the question for the King to determine, and in the face of it, he did just that in a situation without historical precedence.

The fact that some parliamentarian displayed behaviours that were chameleonic, dishonest, opportunistic and corrupt (so, what's new where - US & Trump? UK & BoJo?) by saying to the King that they were supporting Person 1 and changing their choice at the drop of a hat after that meeting complicated things.

The Guardian piece failed to clarify this important piece.

2. Anwar
It sounded like the piece wanted the world to side with Anwar (again) as seemingly democratic principles were abandoned. Lest it be spun, let it be remembered in the heat of the (battle) situation, Anwar offered himself as a candidate. He was nowhere close to getting majority support, and in an embarassing about-face when it was clear he was losing, offered Tun M the candidature to lead the (Anwar's/his!) coalition when Tun M was no longer getting the support of his own party (ie party-less!).

Is the Guardian piece promoting democratic practices or a mouthpiece for Anwar?

3. Tun M
Yes, badly misjudged and miscalculated the support that he was getting as the events were unravelling beyond control. But you could see the logic in what he was doing. Yet it wasn't enough to surmount the decades of animosity and mistrust, and it ended with that internal bickering allowing a dark horse contended to steal the game.

4. UMNO and Muhyiddin
In the end, this is still a fragile coalition. What is not evident is how much of the hard-won democratic space will be retained or if there will be the walking back of the racial patriarchy and patronage culture that is so toxic. How is the mistrust caused by racial polarisation and class divide going to be bridged? Muhyiddin deserves to be given a chance. If not, the Malaysian democratic practice that is in place, and one that the King has demonstrated the robustness of, will show the present ruling coalition out the door sooner rather than later.

Approaching the endgame

1. I am now at the cusp of pulling the trigger, and for now at least, it is more certain than I have ever been before. The only restraint would be the financial needs for education for the three remaining ones.
2. If I were to conduct a Situation Analysis, the following would emerge:

• from a PPA, a company in troubled waters to grow further - capital contraints et al
• my own position, while influential still, is subordinated to higher powers and still seen as working level. Commensurate pay is not achievable and ceiling is real.
• the influence I can wield, from a strategy making and a HRD point of view, is diminished in my position. I'm also not sure if I want to expend enough energy to drag the whole company out of it. 
• from a POA perspective, I have established my credentials. The fact the company does not value me only adds to the angst. There are various opportunities to pursue.

3. Which brings me to the only realistic solution - ie FLEXIT. (hahah)

• From a DA view, stay/go/stay&fight are the only valid options. The 3rd, while still valid, is probably going to go through some serious emotional wringer and turmoil trying to put my points across to pekak-badak.
• The learning point when dealing with people like this is that while political manipulations can be admirable in some ways, it has to be accompanied with a genuine heart-felt, emotional connection to advance people. Otherwise, we are dealing with soulless robots.
• The balanced point of view is the loss of income generation, although the safety net can help in short-term.

4. So what then? Some various revenue generating options emerge.

For the first 3 months (while in tender mode)

• freelancing on training
• aquaponic
• self-development - and pursue post-grad research although this should be done only if it helps with the revenue-generating objective
• Anneige consulting on business development - high-tech Grabba model, SME value creation plans - strategy, HRD, institution building - education model etc
• develop healthcare specialised business models - bridge to market, HSCI-QB3 connections, 
• also to figure out involvement in cybersecurity
• involvement in disruptive tech - IoT - work with UTP.

Also to send out CVs -

• MD positions
• recruiters
• energy companies
• acquintances in energy business 

And to accept part-time/freelancing retainer work

• learning points on investments
• strategy making and sector update
• L&T work

5. All involves disciplined use of time and resources. GTD will be needed more than ever before.

Israel is a racist, islamophobic nation that lies about what is in their hearts

Western media went berserk with Mahathir for saying these things on Israel.

As usual, Israel defended itself as the foremost humanitarian race with superior values. Well.... this seems to be them too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJOV_cN-JP8

Speaking truth to power...

...requires you to build this power base of recognisable expert-level knowledge and to also have within you the moral compass to determine the wisest course of action. You miss out on any of those points, you lose the right to express yourself in the full view of an unforgiving audience, and having each word and syllable being captured and replayed out in minute detail as it is frozen in the abyss of time and the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ijiLqfXP0

Where to, now?

1. Sometimes despite the nice, warm sunny day we can still make out storm clouds gathering and the sense of gratefulness and pleasantry is immediately tinged with a little bit of trepidation and anxiety. Such is the wheel of life that you are both at the top and the bottom at the same time! The ability to balance both, separate out the strands and finally emerge knowing clearly where you stand is important.
2. At the moment, the trepidation lies with the people of power and authority surrounding me - the bigoted mind of you are not worthy as compared to my Pikachu who comes from this esteemed bank and billionaire family heritage, the short-sighted politician with the fixed view on everything that is rectified the next time someone points out that how wrong it is, the dogmatic intellectual who is always correct (and always wrong too) because he argues both ends of the spectrum at the same time, the manipulative leader - who unable to articulate his thoughts and is too insecure and views his time as too precious to take people through his own thought process but argues his position piecemeal until after a long, exhausting process ends up as the completed 400-peice jigsaw he intended in the first place, the seemingly secure, sophisticated urbanite who will not admit to his upbringing and is too jaded to stand up to his position, the clever technocrat who is intent to keep his hands clean of all unnecessary burden from the lower-caste society he is brought on to heal and bring to civilised world.
3. So, where does that leave me?
4. I suppose how I carry myself changes. Being facetious when senior is more fun. I think not being taken seriously does put me on edge.
5. Better fashion sense, better seriousness and bringing issues and agenda that pushes the envelope. Showing better conviction. Making sure I have the right charisma to convince.

We are all equals - even those in the opposite extreme ends

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/19/billionaires-wealth-richest-income-inequality

he bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers

Big Money

US news

The habits of the wealthiest mirror the supposed ‘pathologies’ of the poor. But while those in poverty are called lazy, the rich are dubbed bon vivants

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Brooke Harrington

Fri 19 Oct 2018 02.00 EDT

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We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because most billionaires go to great lengths to seek privacy. Illustration: Sonny Ross

If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe.
In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say things like:
“I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me.’ Because they are really immoral people – too much time on their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was picking up other men’s wives.”
The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth”.

I’ve told my colleagues: 'If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me'

Wealth manager in Geneva

If a poor person voiced such beliefs, he or she might well be institutionalized; for those who work with the wealthy, however, such “eccentricities” are all in a day’s work. Indeed, an underappreciated irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed “pathologies” of the ultra-poor.
In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement. Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by the private lives of the ultra-rich: “They [the clients] have to pick someone they want to know everything about them: about Mother’s lesbian affairs, Brother’s drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the room.” Many of these clients are not employed and live off family largesse, but no one calls them lazy.
As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow:

When a rich man doesn’t want to work
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger
He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk

When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.
Behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy “welfare queens”, “crackheads” and other drug addicts, and the “promiscuous poor” (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).
These disparate perceptions aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy; they are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients –even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.

Why are so few US politicians from the working class?

Read more

Meanwhile, the “billionaire” in the White House starts his days at 11am – the rest of the morning is coyly termed “executive time” – and is known for his frequent holidays. “Nice work if you can get it,” quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because – unlike Trump – most billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: “I want to be invisible.” This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich, specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes “rich list”.

Many even present themselves as homeless – for tax purposes – despite owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:
“I am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says ‘show me a utility bill’, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in Thailand, and it’s in a language that the European authorities aren’t familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world, international marriages, governments can’t keep up with people.”
Meanwhile, the poor can end up being “resident nowhere” because no one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters – which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spaces is increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.
It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.
For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.
So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.