Saturday, October 30, 2010

SM Speech to NTU Forum

There are more blogs commenting on this episode:
Singapore General Election Portal

I don't know what I am defending anymore

Young Singaporeans like Lim Zi Rui are becoming increasingly disillusioned and they’re not afraid to let it show. The 23-year-old final-year aerospace engineering student was among a 1,000-strong crowd who attended a Ministerial Forum organised on Friday by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Students’ Union. Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong was the guest-of-honour.
Singapore General Election Portal

My view
This is perhaps the strongest and most serious feedback sent to a top government leader about the state of unhappiness of the people of Singapore.

Singapore General Election Portal [4]

As the general election gets closer, there are more interesting articles being posted in the portal. Read here:
Singapore General Election Portal. Do bookmark this portal and visit it daily.

Keep server in full service

I engaged a local IT outsourcing contract (Typent) on a monthly contact to monitor my server and look out for cyber attacks and hardware failure. Details of the arrangement are found here.

My server went down today and was out of service for more than two hours. The data center rebooted the server on my request, but it did not work. I asked Typent to went down to the site to identify and fix the problem. It was important that my servers should be fully operational. This was a useful service provided by Typent, as they are familiar with servers. The fault was identified and rectified. The server became operational within one hour. The actual cause was a failure of a hardware switch in the data center, and not with my server.

It is useful to have a service that can be called on, in case of an emergency.  Without this service, it would haev been difficult for me or my developer to fix the problem.

Buy insurance that you really need

Buy insurance that you really need, and not what the agent sells to you, as the agent wishes to make a commission on each dollar that you pay - the more, the better.  Read this article.

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Looking for a good life insurance policy?

I advise consumers to look at the benefit illustration for a whole life or investment-linked policy and check that the effect of deduction does not exceed 20% of the accumulated premium at the end of 25 years. This article explains why I chose 25 years as a gauge and how I derive the benchmark of 20%. It also give the benchmark for other durations.

www.tankinlian.com/latest.aspx

Direct link

Don't combine protection needs

Published in Straits Times Online, Oct 30, 2010

I REFER to Ms Pearlyn Koh's letter ("Insurance clients have different needs"; Thursday). The different needs of the clients can be best met through term insurance, medical insurance, disability insurance and other protection products that are fairly priced and targeted at these needs.
The consumer should not combine the protection needs with the accumulation of savings in the whole-life and unit-linked policies where, in many cases, 50 per cent or more of the future savings could be taken away from them.

Ms Koh asked consumers to seek advisers to help them address their needs. Consumers should be careful to pick honest advisers. I have seen quite a few instances where dishonest advisers sold the wrong product to consumers using half truths and outright lies.
I urge the authorities to set up a hotline for consumers to address their complaints about being sold products that were not properly explained to them, and were unfair in their charges.

Tan Kin Lian

Work on Saturday

Dear Mr. Tan,
As I was driving into a car park, I said hello to the security guard.  We recognize each other as I park at the same car park every week. "Hi, not working today?", he asked.  "No, not on a Saturday," I replied.  "So good", he said with an envious look on his face.

It dawned on me there and then that to some, not having to work on a Saturdays is a real perk! I've not worked on Saturdays since mid 90s and I've forgotten, until I saw the look on the security guard, the agony of having to go to work on Saturdays.

I urge our Ministers and the civil servants to please come down from their high horses to walk the ground of the commoners, who by the way are actually your masters and customers. You are to serve us, not trample over us.


DareToAct

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