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

Will Playboy publish an Indonesian edition?

Rumors are surfacing in the Indonesian blogosphere that the international men’s heavyweight magazine Playboy has plans to start publishing an Indonesian edition. Unfortunately, however, I wouldn’t pay much credence to such claims, even though the Indonesian girlies magazine Popular and the Indonesian version of FHM are doing very good business here by publishing some very racy stuff indeed. 

An Indonesian Playboy edition though would almost certainly receive very strong criticism from Indonesia’s moralist groups even if the magazine compromised and only showed chicks in bikinis. 

In fact, the only Asian edition of Playboy is the Japanese one, although there was a Hong Kong edition until the prudish commies banned it after the British handover of the island in 1997. 
 
The crazy thing though is that while soft pawn Playboy would have problems in getting permission to publish in Indonesia, hardcore pawn is readily available here and selling well. 
 
Take a trip up to Chinatown and see what I mean. Thanks to the backing of certain powerful groups (and we all know who they are!), pirated hardco-re DVDs are doing a roaring trade. 

An Indonesian Playboy edition? I think the Indonesians would be disappointed…

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