Saturday December 24, 2005

Five years

Once in a while, I take a break from the usual issues on this blog and look back in time. Today is one of those times. It's Christmas Eve 2005. While the local consumers are no doubt doing their very best to continue to support the economy, crowding Orchard Road and struggling for bargains and taxis and reaching for their wallets a hundred thousand times over in a heroic last-ditch effort to complete Christmas shopping, I am at home enjoying the peace and quiet in a suburban apartment at the north-east corner of the country, almost about as far from the ongoing city-side consumer orgy as you can get and still remain on the mainland.

It's been five years since Biow and I moved into this HDB 5-room flat in Sengkang. The Sengkang MRT station was still a hole in the ground. The Compass Point Mall was, roughly speaking, part of that same hole in the ground. The bus interchange consisted of a few buses parked along the roadside and a makeshift office run out of a converted cargo container.

There was a large sign posted on the side of the workers' quarters where the Compass Heights condo was to be built. The sign said something to the effect of "MRT - 25 minutes to city", and there was a large arrow pointing due south in the direction of the same city area where the shopping spree is presumably going on right now. "That's nice. We can take MRT to Orchard Road and Raffles Place", I remember saying to Biow. We were walking to our new home from the temporary bus interchange. It was late at night, and with few residents and fewer facilities, it was dark, but the future seemed bright. We had started working not too long ago, got married, and plonked down what little cash and CPF we had towards the downpayment of our new home. The NASDAQ, tech, and telco boom was going on, though we were only dimly aware of it at the time. I had just joined a dotcom company and that was how I knew there was supposed to be a boom going on. Everybody seemed to be happy, and so were we. I did get a 30% pay jump, didn't I? What could go wrong?

There was plenty, in hindsight, going wrong. The NASDAQ had already peaked at 5048.62 on 10 March 2000. We didn't know that. The dotcom company that I had just joined was going to start to lose millions of dollars on a complex, overdue project and a later botched spinoff attempt, but we didn't know that either. The Singapore housing bubble had already burst back in 1996/1997 and was continuing to leak, but the only kind of bubble we knew back then involved soapy solution and water. The oil price was beginning its long upward climb from $10 per barrel but then, I had no idea that a barrel was a unit of measurement.

Did I know anything at all back then? I knew how to write programs in Java, Pascal, and, if really pressed for it - C, C++ and assembly. I knew how to get my program to talk to an Oracle database. That much I knew. I could set up a working network from a bunch of PC's, network cards and assorted pieces of LAN cable. I could take apart a computer, put it back again, build one from individual component parts, and diagnose with some degree of accuracy what had gone wrong with a PC that failed to boot. That, I could do.

But even though there was plenty lurking beneath the surface of our civilization, and even though we were not aware of most if not nearly all of it, society, and time, moved on. We decided that 2-hour commutes to/from work and home were much too long, so we got a car. I didn't know what sort of car it was (VTEC, CVT, MMT, D15B, Vti were foreign labels), I just wanted a Honda Civic - with automatic transmission. Biow then moved to work in the same dotcom company as I did. Cool, we could car-pool.

Our friends, former classmates and colleagues got married too, and went on to get their own homes as well. Most of them got into condos, many of them into "executive condominiums", a class supposedly in between plain-Jane HDB and the more expensive "true" condos. Some of them started families. In time, we did too.

That was when it hit us. My, the money sure disappeared pretty quickly, didn't it. Weren't we able to save quite a hefty chunk of our salary earlier on? What is this "debt" thing? The loans are quite the culprit, aren't they? Housing loan, car loan, renovation loan, hire purchase payments. Is there anything we can do about it? Weren't 10-20% salary increments supposed to help out? What happened to that big project that was supposed to bring in the big money? Why the vague grumblings from those who dabbled in the stock markets?

So I thought, maybe I should find out more about this world, and how it works. So I went onto the internet and started to do some research. And one of the results of all that research done since then is this blog, and the one before it. The continuing stories of peak oil, resource depletion, climate change, globalization, the race to the bottom, outsourcing, technological and societal complexity, I chronicle them as I see them. All of this is more for my own reference, actually. But then this is the web - readers are welcome, lurkers too.

Who knows what stories the next five years will bring up? What will be the story of our lives, our society, our civilization? Will we reach a technological singularity (however unlikely), or hit the limits to growth first? (rather more likely). We'll see.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas 2005, and a Happy New Year 2006 (in advance).

(2005-12-24 23:55:37 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [3]

Most popular blog postings on lowem.log :

1. Singapore MRT rail network length to double by 2020
2. 2010 Nissan Leaf electric car specifications : 107hp, 24KWh lithium-ion batteries, 100-mile range
3. Live spot gold price quotes chart on COMEX
4. 2010 Toyota Prius specifications released : 50 mpg, 1.8L, 134hp, Ni-MH, solar roof option
5. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 2011 direct download link
6. Real-time live gold and silver price quotes chart on COMEX
7. Singapore electric vehicles : Government agencies EMA and LTA to study EV introduction
8. Book review : Shut Down by William Flynn

Featured articles on lowem.log :

1. Book review : Shut Down by William Flynn
2. Singapore electric cars testing starts with 9 electric vehicles
3. Honda, GS Yuasa JV to make lithium-ion batteries for 2010/2011 Honda Civic Hybrid
4. 2010 Honda Civic Hybrid preliminary specifications released
5. 2010 Honda CR-Z hybrid, 2010 Honda Fit/Jazz hybrid models confirmed
6. 2010 Toyota Prius specifications released : 50 mpg, 1.8L, 134hp, Ni-MH, solar roof option
7. NYMEX crude oil recovers from $32.40 low after 2.2 mbpd OPEC production cut announced
8. Singapore : Nuclear power not ruled out