There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in

On signal countdown timers

A couple of years back they started to install countdown timers at traffic lights across Jakarta:


And then, almost as quickly, they started to uninstall them - or just leave them there but not functioning. The photo above was taken recently at one of the intersections in leafy Menteng, where they conceivably forgot to disable it, but nearly everywhere else, and especially at the city’s main intersections, they’ve been removed or disabled.

This is a strange way to use taxpayers money so what the heck is going on?

It could have been just a scam to spend City Hall money but I doubt it. More likely, I reckon, is that the countdown timers were probably causing accidents: note that if the countdown is on when the lights are green, then the driver knows exactly how much time they have before they must get through - and this may have encouraged reckless motorists to speed up when the timer had nearly run down to zero in a frantic attempt to make it through. And then banggg!!!!!!!

Who knows?

Interestingly, the countdown timer at the leafy Menteng intersection pictured above only counts down when the lights are red.

This means you can sit comfortably in your car knowing exactly how long it will be before you can start to move again. In other words, the countdown timer is of no real use whatsoever. Completely pointless.

And after all, you can always drive through the lights when they are red anyway!


Arggggggggggggg!!!!!!!!!!

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