Sat, 30 Aug 2008
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Welcome To VincentRich.com!
Are you looking for the truth about making money online? Here's an open and honest blog about my journey from being just over broke(JOB) to achieving financial freedom on my own terms. Here you will discover how you can make money online with affiliate program marketing and Google AdSense.
The Maid Trade by Journeyman Pictures is a very interesting glimpse of the harsh working conditions of some of the foreign domestic workers in my so-called first world country of Singapore.
Pay close attention to the second minute of the video. The trainer in the video pointed to a picture of a dark-skinned man and told the maids in the class not to get a boyfriend like that with some very racist words. I have no idea how this can be allowed to be taught in the maid agencies.
Where else can you pay someone as low as SGD $200 per month to work in your home all day long without any off days? You can even make them sleep on the kitchen floor, underneath the table or any where you please. A lot of maids are not allowed to sit at the same table with their employers or on the sofa, even though their pets can do it. Most of the time, the employers ask their maids to eat their leftover food. We treat them like sub-humans. What’s worse? They are trained to call their female employers “MUM” instead of “Maam”.
I know this because this was how my mum and relatives do it. My mum was very harsh on the maids. My dad would allow day offs and let them sit on the sofa and dining table with us. My older sister used to share a bedroom with one of our maids and it was great but my mum would never allow it at her place. My parents had very different styles of handling maids and they had numerous conflicts because of this. Things became easier for them when they divorced so they could hire their own maids and be free of each other’s differences.
The Singapore government has some stupid rules that push all the responsibility of the maids’ conducts on their employers. Therefore, there are all sorts of fines for the employers if their maids misbehave. That is why the maids are told not to have boyfriends, marry in Singapore or get pregnant in Singapore, which is the main reason why employers do not allow their maids to leave the house. The employers have the right to send the maids back to the agent or straight back to wherever they came from if they break the rules.
The Singapore government charges a heftly maid levy of SGD $265 and above every month, which is paid by the employer. Is it any wonder why they don’t really care about them? They get more money than most of the maids. With over 140000 maids in Singapore, the government gets above SGD $37,100,000 a month, or SGD $445,200,000 a year! This is a big business!
If you ask me, most people don’t need maids. They should spend a few hours per week doing their own house work, cook their own meals, wash the dishes and take care of their own kids. I wish my parents did that because I hardly had any quality time with them when I was growing up.
I just can’t look myself in the mirror if I paid someone about SGD $250 per month to work in my house to do all the things I should do myself. Just because we have no minimum wage laws in Singapore, does not mean I should exploit this situation by hiring a foreign worker who is willing to take ridiculously low wages. This is modern day slavery at its best. We deny them even less of the human rights our government denies us.
This is just the part on domestic workers in Singapore. The situation of the other non-domestic foreign workers is much worse. It is sad that this happens in Singapore and we need to fix this as soon as possible. This is a humuliating disgrace for all Singaporeans.
Tagged As: Domestic worker, Singapore, Wage
Categories: Singapore News | No Comments » |
I will no longer be posting posts about WordPress, web development, web design and search engine optmization on this blog. Instead, I will post them on my new site Maverick Web Creations, which I created to advertise my WordPress services.
Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments » |
I have not caught on the social networking hype of registering on sites like Twitter. I did not want to waste my time on things like Twitter because I am not a person who likes to check out what’s the latest news about other people except for my favourite band, Oasis.
A few weeks ago, I decided to test the status feature of Facebook. I was feeling happy and relieved that this unpleasant house mate of mine was going to move out soon in early August so I added a countdown message that went something like “3 more days to go”. Some of my friends started sending me messages asking me what I was counting down to!
When my house mate moved out, I changed my status message to something like “So long sucker, hope you don’t steal other people’s shampoo and take other people’s stuff in the future!”. A female friend of mine then asked me what caused me to get so upset.
Now I am beginning to understand why sites like Twitter are so popular. Some people just love these one-liners and have to know more. I think I should start using Twitter and some other similar sites like it even though I think they are dumb.
The problem is, I do not wish to login to all of my social networking sites to manually update all my status messages. I stumbled on a WordPress plugin called PingPress.fm that might do the trick. It works with Ping.fm, which is a free service that helps you to update all your social networks at one place. I will test it out and see how it goes.
Tagged As: Facebook, Message, Social network, Social network service, Social-media, Status message, Twitter
Categories: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments » |
Every year in Singapore, the government gets someone to release a communist-styled patriotic song. This year’s song is titled “The Singapore Song”.
The line that stuck out for me was “So in this homeland I vow to live and die”. I think they are trying to persuade more Singaporeans to live and die in Singapore, which is a huge problem for them because more and more people are leaving Singapore to live and die elsewhere.
If you compare our songs with the patriotic songs from China, you will see some similarities.
Love my Motherland (爱我中华) is a very popular song in China but the singing style is really old fashioned. Not many people sing like this today. Singapore patriotic songs are modern versions of these songs based on the same formula of brainwashing the population to love the government and country. I remember being forced to learn these songs in school and sing them on national day every year. I just cannot do this any more.
Categories: Singapore News | No Comments » |
I was surprised how quickly WordPress 2.6 was released. I still have an unresolved bug about the WordPress 2.5 wp_list_pages function. Unfortunately, they did not fix this bug or maybe they don’t plan to.
Back to WordPress 2.6. I am kind of confused by all the features WordPress has to offer. This video from WordPress will show you some of the new features in WordPress 2.6.
Upgrading from WordPress 2.5.1 to WordPress 2.6 was a snap for my blog. If you have not started with WordPress 2.6, now is a great time to start.
Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments » |
Chee Soon Juan and Lee Kuan Yew finally met in court. Lee testified the following in court under oath:
“Your honour, the International Bar Association decided to honour Singapore and hold its annual conference in this city and you [Dr Chee] were given an opportunity to present your case, with your complaint that Singapore lack the rule of law. There were some 3000 lawyers there.
I think they left Singapore with a very different impression from what you have projected because we have a letter from the President of the International Bar Association to the organisers, namely the Law Society of Singapore, how successful the meeting was and how impressed they were by the standards they found to obtain in the judiciary.”
You can find proof of this at SDP’s web site by downloading the MP3 recordings of the court proceedings. Furthermore, IBA confirmed that they never wrote such a letter to Singapore praising our wonderful judiciary. Instead, the IBA came out with a report with 18 recommendations for us to improve our judiary system.
What’s worse, Miss Yeong Yoon Ying, Press Secretary to Minister Mentor, claimed that Chee Soon Juan called the Singapore leaders “murderers, robbers, child molesters” and “rapists.” Totally untrue!
I am glad I do not subscribe to the Straits Times newspaper because I believe it is an absolute waste of my money and paper to read the junk the government prints on it. Reading the Straits Times is an insult to my intelligence because I am supposed to believe the rubbish they write. Without the internet, I would have believed everything Lee Kuan Yew and his press secretary said, just like most Singaporeans.
Tagged As: Chee Soon Juan, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore, Straits Times
Categories: Singapore News | No Comments » |
Finally! Google has decided to reveal the monthly and yearly searches for every keyword phrase searched on Google.com. I hope there is an API for this so that all the keyword software makers can integrate this into their software as soon as possible.
According to Google AdWords Help Center:
The Approx Search Volume [Previous Month] column shows search volume statistics for the last calendar month. The Approx Avg Search Volume column shows average monthly search volume over a recent 12-month period.
Since Yahoo’s Overture keyword tool is officially dead, this tool is the next best thing at the moment. Google should have done this earlier.
Tagged As: AdWords, Google, Google Advertising Professional, Google search, Search Engines, Searching, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Search Marketing
Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments » |
In the past week, I have experienced 2 incidents of extremely stupid and bad customer service from 2 eBay sellers.
The first seller to piss me off was bigrockmedia. You would expect an eBay seller with 98000 feedback points to behave smarter but they don’t because their checkout system does not work for people from Singapore.
I won a “Buy it now” auction for a music DVD and I wanted to pay immediately after the auction. However, the ChannelAdvisor.com checkout system does not have Singapore in its country list. I guess this is either the seller’s fault or ChannelAdvisor.com’s fault. I have tried to contact bigrockmedia 3 times but they have not replied to me at all.
The second seller to piss me off was trade4office. This seller is a Power Seller and they should know how to read their emails to check for their orders. In one of their listings for velcros, they said:
So I sent them an email saying:
Their reply was:
First of all, I have emailed them the number of yards of velcro I want. Secondly, they seem to have misread my email to them or something to give me an absurd reply like this with a typo. This proves that they just don’t give a damn about reading and replying to customer emails.
Lessons We Should All Learn From The 2 eBay Sellers Above
Common sense stuff if you ask me but lots of people just don’t care enough to apply this stuff.
Categories: eBay | No Comments » |
Last year, I posted a list of my favourite WordPress plugins. Today, I use a slightly different lineup of WordPress plugins because I have found better plugins to replace some of the older plugins I used and the latest WordPress has made certain plugins obsolete.
The 2007 WordPress Plugin List
The 2008 WordPress Plugin List
Tagged As: All in One SEO Pack, FeedBurner FeedSmith, ShareThis, wordpress, wordpress plugins, WP-reCAPTCHA, Zemanta
Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments » |
Here are some of my social networking profile pages:
I am going to join Twitter and FriendFind soon just to see what the fuss is all about. In the mean time, let’s connect via these social networking sites.
Tagged As: Social-networking
Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments » |
