From yesterday’s The Star newspaper report, about 30% of Malaysia’s affluent earn RM4,000 and above. Are you part of the 30%? With the economic doom and gloom and sub-prime crisis in USA with impending global recession, it heralds for austerity measures for the rich and poor alike. The rich will be affected in their potential earnings and drop of value in their shares or unit trusts while the poor will have to suffer by paying more for food and cost of living without any marginal increase in their income. Gone are the days where we can spend impromptu and without much thought. With so many banks in USA going bankrupt like Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, etc, we have to watch out for our hard-earned savings that are thankfully guaranteed 100% by the Malaysian government up to year 2010.

To receive payment from a USA company for writing articles, I need to apply for a Tax Identification Number (TIN) from the USA. I cannot apply for SSN or social security number as I am not a US resident. As a foreigner, I can only apply for TIN and I have emailed my US company yesterday to help me in the application but until today, I did not get any response email from them. Looks like I have to apply by myself alone and I am checking up the web sites and printed out the application form last night. I still don’t know who to approach to certify my identity card and driver’s license copies as true ones. I may have to look for a Notary Public to help me in this or worse come to worse, just sent the copies without being certified to the USA address for the TIN application. This is a hassle to get payment from the states.

My 3 wordpress blogs from the same hosting company were down recently and since then, I could not publish a single post. This explains the lag of time taking several days. When my hosting company checked my sites, they were able to publish a test post in KL. So there was nothing wrong with my wordpress files. By the way, my olive green t-shirt by Wordpress is coming soon. I have ordered via liewcf who graciously will pay for the postage fees to Penang including the postage cost to order the t-shirts from UK. This is my little support for Wordpress. And only today, after emailing my hosting company again, am I able to publish my post as you can see here. Otherwise I was contemplating of switching to Blue Host in USA.

Today is the 51st anniversary of Merdeka. We have been independant for 51 years. We have seen progress in terms of more mosques being built and Malays getting richer by the day while the Chinese and other races are left out in taking a slice of the cake. Our own churches have to be self funded while the government spent public money including Chinese money to built big mosques for their own kind. We are governed by a racist government who promotes the well being of their own race calling themselves bumiputeras while marginalising other races as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew mentioned. The Chinese are marginalized because they are hard working, diligent and richer. The only hope for our non-Malay kids is to send them overseas as there are hardly any place in the local universities for them. But then, not everyone has the financial means to send their kids overseas for studies. Even I had to take a bank loan to finance my tertiary studies in Singapore for 4 years. Not smart enough for a scholarship then