Why Malaysia Should Stop Trying To Be A High-Income Nation

Just recently, at the Barisan National Open House in Penang, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak reiterated his government's stand to make Malaysia a high-income nation by 2020.

By this, I assume the government means that it intends either to push up our income levels to "rich" levels, or create a much larger class of wealthy people compared to what we have today

While it is certainly comforting to dream about our future lives of fat pockets, fast cars and large bank accounts, this mindset is, to put plainly, foolish.

Emotions, Online

“@terencewang101 hey, long time no see bro... How’s life?”


On 11:44 a.m., 19 September 1982, Scott Fahlman became the first person in the world to use an emoticon.

Posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board, he was proposing characters for people to express themselves online better. In particular, their emotions. In an early digital world that communicated purely in text, Fahlman knew it would be important to have a means to replace one of the most significant parts of human interaction. And so he decided on three characters - a colon to represent the eyes, a dash for the nose, and a curved bracket for the (what else?) mouth.

I suspect, however, he never imagined the crude, yet ingenious smiley would live on to become an irreplaceable staple of the online world.

"I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use
:-( "